We don’t doubt for a moment that President Obama thinks he’s surrounded by Republicans — given the Democrats’ lack of any accomplishments on Capitol Hill.
But that hardly justifies what he and other leading Democrats have been doing lately.
The Hill newspaper notes that top Democrats from Obama on down have begun referring to the legislative branch as “the Republican Congress” — as if their own party’s majority in the Senate didn’t even exist.
“I’m the first one to acknowledge that the relations between myself and the Republican Congress have not been good over the past several months,” Obama said in an ABC News interview this month.
Now, Obama isn’t the first president to run for re-election by railing against “the Republican Congress.”
The tactic worked for Harry Truman in 1948 and again for Bill Clinton in 1996.
But there was one big difference: Both those presidents actually had to deal with a Congress completely controlled by the GOP.
In fact, as House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman notes, Republicans control only one-half of one of the three branches of the federal government.
No, you can’t blame Obama for trying.
After all, polls suggest that many Americans don’t even realize that the Democrats control the Senate.
(Given the party’s abysmal record, who can blame them?)
But with Congress increasingly held in low esteem by the public, Obama wants to sever — rhetorically, anyway — any connection between his party and the institution.
Even if it means completely distorting reality.
Actually, there’s an easy way around this.
If Democrats don’t want to acknowledge their Senate majority, voters can quite readily take it away from them next November.
Then it will be a “Republican Congress” for real.