Maddow: Obama's presidency 'at risk of becoming a punch line'

By Laura Conaway

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Wed Dec 8, 2010 9:37 AM EST

"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." That quote's attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, though it's not clear he's the one who first uttered it. On the show last night, Rachel Maddow used it to show what's happening with the Obama presidency, only in reverse.

"We are seeing quite literally this process playing out backwards with the presidency, this historic presidency that came about because of a brilliant and country-changing campaign," she said, noting how President Obama won office, only to have Republicans turn every issue into a potential Waterloo for him. He won the 2008 election, they fought him, and they stung him in the 2010 congressional elections.

"What is happening now is that this presidency is at risk of becoming a punch line," she continued. It's not that he has lost a fight or two or three or four. It's that the very idea that he knows how to win or even wants to win has become a joke. . . . When this president starts to be ignored, when what he wants, his political vision becomes irrelevant. . . . If the president cannot win when his party is the majority in Congress, if no one can even conceive of the president winning fights when his party is in the majority, let alone the minority in Washington, then the presidency itself starts to atrophy. It starts to disappear."

I can't remember an issue that so divided our audience as the deal President Obama cut with Republicans on taxes and unemployment benefits. Thread's open.