Bill Nelson: “I wanted to say to my friend and my colleague and our leader that the President of the United States, when he was…”

“I wanted to say to my friend and my colleague and our leader that the President of the United States, when he was Governor of Texas, had a reputation as someone who reached out as a uniter, bringing together the two parties in a bipartisan way. Since the President has been elected President and has served in that capacity, he has chosen to change, for what reason I do not know because the country yearns for bipartisanship. That was clearly one of the messages that came out of last year's election, the 2006 election, that the people of this country are tired of the partisan bickering, and they want us to come together. Yet, as the majority leader was just recounting, there has been occasion after occasion where it seems, unnecessarily, that the White House has gone out of its way to attack someone simply because they were a member of the other party. I want to give the Senate an example. Because I had been twice before, over a 6-year period, to visit the President of Syria, immediately upon the Iraq study commission report that recommended that we open up to Syria, this Senator from Florida decided that I was going to go back, hoping that there might be some encounter in that conversation with the President of Syria that might crack the door a little bit. I did that in the week before Christmas.…”