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GOP refused to negotiate with Team Obama - even in bed!

Republicans' obsession with thwarting President Obama—even at the cost of hurting the country—was so all-consuming that it even became a point of contention

Republicans' obsession with thwarting President Obama—even at the cost of hurting the country—was so all-consuming that it even became a point of contention between the sheets. When one Obama staffer asked his Republican girlfriend for a deal on stimulus—economic, that is—she stiffed him, one journalist recounted on PoliticsNation Wednesday

For his book, The New New Deal, Time's Michael Grunwald interviewed an Obama aide who was having a relationship with a Republican Senate staffer.

"He said, 'hey, what's our deal gonna be with the stimulus?,'" Grunwald told Rev. Al. "And she told him, in bed, she said: 'Baby, there is no deal.'" 


Inter-party romance aside, that kind of utter refusal to negotiate characterized the GOP strategy from the very start of Obama's presidency, Grunwald said.

"This was the strategy from day one," he put it.

Grunwald explained that when Obama first came to office, in the midst of an economic crisis, Republicans were expected to go along with him.

Instead, he said, they chose a different course: "They had these meetings where they said 'no, our way back is to fight.'" 

"I quote Republican senators like George Voinovich saying that if Obama was for it, we had to be against it," Grunwald added. "Mike Castle of Delaware saying that from the beginning, the caucus decided that we couldn’t give Obama a bipartisan victory."