By Arun Kumar, IANS,
Washington: President Barack Obama has accused opposition Republicans of grinding the government to a halt over personal animosity toward him – as well as an inability to compromise.
“You know, you never want to say, ‘It’s all them’,” he said in a Yahoo!/ABC News interview Thursday, faulting the Republicans for congressional and legislative gridlock.
“But I do think that right now at least, in the Republican Party there are a couple of notions. Number one is that compromise is a dirty word. Number two, anything that Obama’s for, we’re against.”
“If I propose a health care bill that is full of Republican ideas – in fact, is very similar to the law that was passed by the current Republican front runner (Mitt Romney), or one of the top front runners and the other guy was supportive of many of the ideas as well – suddenly, they become against it,” he said.
“I do think those dynamics are making it more difficult to get things done,” Obama said. “And it’s not unusual, after such a severe economic crisis like this, for the politics to be impacted by that, for people to lurch into extremes, or to get more combative.”
Obama said that there is no reason “the government should shut down over this”.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])