Yesterday was a bad day for Democrats on the Sunday shows.\u00a0 Like an unprepared college student taking an oral exam from Professor Christopher Wallace PhD, Nancy Pelosi haltingly rambled from one stale talking point to the next.\u00a0 Dick Durbin trotted out the predictable list of awful budget cuts contemplated by dastardly Republicans.\u00a0 Which wasn\u2019t too persuasive because the sequester was Obama\u2019s idea.\u00a0 A 3% budget cut does not look draconian to Americans in the real world outside the Beltway; even the hyper-partisan David Gregory made fun of Durbin.\u00a0 Democrats look greedy demanding yet another tax increase \u2013 the second in three months, as more than one Republican pointed out. To those outside Obama\u2019s inner circle, \u201cbalance\u201d means \u201cLast time you got tax hikes, this time we get spending cuts.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the pay-off from Republicans finally making some politically shrewd decisions.\u00a0 They let Obama get his fabled \u201ctax hike on the rich,\u201d which was unavoidable and far smaller than it might have been. After a two-month victory dance following the November election, the media was looking forward to a \u201cdisastrous default on U.S. obligations\u201d that could be blamed on benighted Tea Party Republicans.\u00a0 Instead the Republicans postponed the debt ceiling issue and tacitly accepted Obama\u2019s sequester, while forcing the Senate to pass a budget.<\/p>\n
So now the media lacks compelling anti-Republican talking points. Obama gets much of the blame for lay-offs at military bases, kids missing Head Start, cuts in cancer research etc.\u00a0 Obama can no longer pretend to be an innocent bystander to the \u201cdysfunction in Washington.\u201d Second, influential liberals in academia and the media will be slammed by the cuts; NPR has already run a couple of shows on \u201cWhat the Sequester means to you.\u201d\u00a0 They will start to figure out that the relentless rise in entitlements is squeezing their top spending priorities.\u00a0 Maybe entitlement reform is not so dumb after all.\u00a0 Third, a protracted, multi-stage budget showdown between Congress and the White House stretching through the Spring \u2013 first the Sequester hitting on March 1, then the end of the continuing resolution on March 23, then Round Two of the debt ceiling showdown in June — \u00a0gives Obama less time to push other parts of his agenda such as raising energy prices and despoiling the American landscape with thousands of solar panels and windmills in a futile effort to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, which are being driven by China and India, not the U.S..\u00a0 (If Obama is really worried about greenhouse gasses, he should pressure California and New York to permit fracking.)<\/p>\n
Obama has a few other problems.\u00a0 The Benghazi bungle is not going away, with Lindsay Graham putting a \u201chold\u201d on the nominations of Brennan and Hagel.\u00a0 The Hagel nomination is another embarrassment; in Washington, it\u2019s OK to be an empty suit, but it can\u2019t be a clown suit.\u00a0 New efforts at gun control have reenergized the Republican base while putting Red State Senators up for reelection next year in a difficult position.\u00a0 Now that they are done helping Obama win reelection the media are starting to notice his haughty intransigence.<\/p>\n
Both economically and politically, Obama\u2019s smart move is to drop the tax hike fixation and move on to entitlement reform, which would improve the budget outlook and boost business confidence without imposing near-term \u201causterity\u201d that slows economic growth now. But he is too ideological to do that; redistribution and bigger government is a higher priority\u00a0 than economic growth.<\/p>\n
Copyright Thomas Doerflinger 2013.\u00a0 All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday was a bad day for Democrats on the Sunday shows.\u00a0 Like an unprepared college student taking an oral exam from Professor Christopher Wallace PhD, Nancy Pelosi haltingly rambled from one stale talking point to the next.\u00a0 Dick Durbin trotted … Continue reading