Redstate...
The
Drunk On The Beltway: Two Obama
Tricks That Are Going To Clean Boehner’s Clock
Posted by Michael Hammond
Monday, June 27th
Watching
House Speaker John Boehner
and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell negotiate with Barack
Obama is like
watching a drunk try to run across the Beltway. Whether it’s ObamaCare,
the
financial reform bill, the Kagan nomination, the disastrous Lame Duck
agenda,
the Senate rules battle, the pathetic “continuing resolution deal,” or
the
current debt limit fight, you know both of them will end up as a
splotch on the
road, marked by Barack Obama’s tiretracks.
Let
me predict two tactics Obama will
use:
ObamaTrick
#1: ADDING CHIPS TO THE
PILE
Democrats
approach negotiations with a
stack of demands they expect to bargain away. Republicans go to the
table with
the position they intend to end up with.
Who
do you think’s going to win that
negotiation?
Examples:
Remember
the “public option” which
Democrats absolutely had to have? Hapless Republicans spent months
battling it
-– only to have it traded away for ObamaCare as we currently know it.
Feel
good about that deal, huh?
Remember
the Democrats’ absolute
refusal to accept an extension of the Bush tax cuts that would go to
the
“wealthy”? Republicans drew their line in the sand on that issue -–
only to
have it bargained away in exchange for a tax extender bill written
largely by
Obama, the START Treaty, the repeal of “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell,” a new
entitlement, and a reenergized Obama administration risen from the
electoral
ashes.
Oh.
And Obama also walked away with
the GOP’s lunch money (the tax cut issue).
Remember
the Senate Democrats’ threat
to abolish the filibuster with 51 votes? Notwithstanding the
parliamentary
corruption that went into the passage of ObamaCare, the Republican
negotiators,
led by Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, went to the negotiating table
with no
demands of their own. As a result, Republican procedural rights were
curtailed
even further, and Harry Reid went unpunished for his Madoff-like
procedural
tactics used to pass ObamaCare.
So
will it be with the debt limit.
Currently,
Democrats are “absolutely,
positively” unwilling to accept a deal that will not raise taxes by
$400
billion.
Really?
If
Democrats can get feckless
Republicans to agree to big hidden tax increases, like a recomputation
of the
Consumer Price Index, a bunch of user fees, or an end to the ethanol
tax
credit, it will be so much the better for them.
But
what if Obama gets nothing more
than a bill with short-term defense cuts and a bunch of illusory
domestic
spending cuts that don’t kick in until 2018?
In exchange for raising the debt limit past
the 2012 election by $2
trillion in order to fund bloated already-enacted Obama spending?
Will
that be a GOP victory?
Boehner,
egged on by the New York
Times, will do another victory lap. But a $2 trillion debt limit
increase, in
exchange for virtually no actual spending cuts, will not be a victory.
Yeah.
I know, I know. There’s another
narrative which is being pushed by some: that Obama, faced with an
intractable
economy, wants the Republicans to kill the debt limit so that he can
blame them
for his problems.
Under
this scenario, the only winning
strategy for Republicans is to give in to all Democratic demands -– and
raise the
debt limit at all costs.
But
if they did that, the GOP would
face a rebellion from its base. And the notion that Obama wants the
economy to
tank because he thinks it would be possible to shift blame strains
credulity.
So
here’s a better idea:
First,
Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey
needs to get repeated votes on his bill to require that interest on the
debt be
paid, even if the debt limit is not raised. This can be done because
the cost
of debt service is only roughly 6% of the federal budget, whereas
60-70% of the
budget would continue to come in, even if the federal government can’t
borrow a
penny.
The
Toomey proposal was rejected by
Democrats, partly on the theory that it was unnecessary. But the likes
of Ben
Bernanke continue to demand the debt limit increase on the grounds that
default
is unthinkable. So Toomey needs to continue to pound his point into
their
little heads.
Second,
Boehner should mimic some of
Obama’s tactics.
Start
out with a non-negotiable demand
that none of the $2 trillion debt limit increase can be used to fund
ObamaCare,
which is certainly part of the upward pressure on health costs
responsible for
the additional borrowing demands.
Let
the debt limit battle be over the
wildly unpopular ObamaCare law.
Over
and over again, election
“experts” tell us that the 2012 elections will be fought over ObamaCare.
But
you know what? If Republicans
ignore the issue until October 15, 2012, they’re not going to have a
whole lot
of credibility.
Republicans
promised they would work
relentlessly to repeal the bill or parts of it. After an initial vote
-– which
GOP lawmakers publicly conceded was only a can’t-pass sop to their
voters -–
they dropped it.
And
what about the non-stop hearings
that were going to be held on ObamaCare? What happened to them?
In
the meantime, Democrats continue to
tweak ObamaCare, through legislation and regulation. The nominations
bill, S.
679, currently pending in the Senate, has a big hidden amendment to
ObamaCare
in it.
It’s
time for Republicans to
demonstrate they care as passionately about repealing ObamaCare as
Obama feels
about preserving it.
ObamaTrick
#2: CHARACTER ASSASSINATION
About
once a year, I learn something
interesting from the Bush retreads on Fox News.
This
year, it was from Democratic
strategist Bob Beckel, who, within the last few weeks, predicted that
the bad
economy would not deny Obama a second term because the Democrats would
simply
engage in a campaign of character assassination against the Republican
nominee.
This
is how Democrats maintained the
Senate, after their efforts to campaign on ObamaCare failed miserably.
Republicans,
led by Bush strategist
Karl Rove, seem to be counting on this syllogism to knock off Barack:
No
president since Roosevelt has won reelection with an unemployment rate
over
7.2%. Economists predict the unemployment rate in November, 2012, will
be 7.8
to 8.2%. Ergo, absent some major factor, Obama will not be reelected.
To
paraphrase JFK’s famous bromide on
taxes: In an economic catastrophe, the rising flood will raise all
Republican
boats.
The
problem with this theory is it
rationalizes a scenario in which the congressional Republican
leadership
continues to screw up -– and suggests they can do so without throwing
away the
2012 election.
There
is a slight chance that this may
not be wrong. But it is a VERY dangerous way of thinking.
For
those who have watched what Obama
and a sycophantic media can do to, for example, Sarah Palin, an
electoral
strategy that consists of hoping that America will go down the tubes is
inadequate.
Republicans
need to prepare the
American people for Obama’s campaign of sleaze by running ads telling
them what
he’s planning to do. Then, when it actually happens, they can run ads
saying
“Aha! Told you so!”
Aside
from that, the American people
are prepared to believe that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid
are
slimebags.
Vaguely,
they remember the economic
fraud -– the lies –- the bribes — the Ponzi schemes -– the secret
meetings -–
the deception -– the moral flip-flops — that went into passing
ObamaCare. They
just need to be reminded.
We
are now finding out that promises
that everyone knew weren’t true were, in fact, not true.
The
McKinsey study now predicts that
78,000,000 Americans will lose the insurance they currently have.
Compared to
Obama’s repeated projection (“zero”), 78,000,000 is greater by a factor
of
infinity.
We
also know that, contrary to
Congressional Budget Office projections, premiums are not staying the
same
under ObamaCare. They rose, in many cases, close to double digits in
the first
year.
And,
as to allegations concerning GOP
friendship with the evil insurance companies, Republicans weren’t the
ones who
gave Big Insurance the biggest bribe in human history — the individual
mandate
-– in order to silence any potential “Harry-and-Louise ads.” That would
be
Barack Obama.
The
average insurance policy -– even
before Barack Obama’s gold-plated bells-and-whistles policies have
kicked in -–
runs nearly $5,000 for a single person and $13,770 for a family of four.
Do
kids earning $50,000 a year -–
living from paycheck to paycheck -– saddled with huge burdens on debt
-–
understand they will be hit by this freight train unless Obama is
defeated?
No.
They don’t. But the GOP has an
obligation to tell them.
And
all it will take is for
Republicans to refuse to be the unresponsive victims of character
assassination
by people whose bribes, fraud, and lies should have put them in prison.
Is
that too much to ask?
Read
it at Redstate
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