Emerging from a two-hour meeting in the Capitol with Obama advisers Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, Senate Democrats praised the President-elect's team for agreeing to make changes to its stimulus proposal based off of concerns senators raised last week at a meeting with the president-elect's senior aides.The Obama team made a proposal, listened to criticisms and agreed to make concessions for its plan. Drastically different behavior from anything of the last 8 years. Probably most telling, a few days ago Obama himself said when discussing his plans for an economic stimulus: "This is not an intellectual exercise, and there’s no pride of authorship,” Obama said. “If somebody has an idea for a tax cut that’s better than we’ve proposed, then we’ll embrace it.” I could not imagine George Bush ever saying anything similar to those words.
Never did such cooperation happen under George Bush. It was either his way or no way. Anyone who dared speak out against a George Bush plan was called anti-American or a socialist or a terrorist sympathizer.
I'm encouraged by Obama's openness and frankness with the American people. I'm also encouraged by his willingness to work together on solutions. There is no 'with us or against us' chest pumping macho man talk. Just by reading this site you can see (here and here and here) that I currently don't support the initial Obama plan he submitted; however, in REALITY people are allowed to disagree about plans and proposals and not be called a "hater" or have their patriotism questioned.
Those days are gone, forever I hope.
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