Forbes
How
President Obama Lost His Shirt
to John Boehner
The
House, under the leadership of
Speaker John Boehner, has precipitated a postponement in the debt
ceiling fight
until May. This represents a strategic choice by Boehner to make the
Sequester
fight, not the debt ceiling fight, the next major engagement. Much of
the
mainstream media now is accusing Congress of “kicking the can down the
road.”
They are missing the strategic implications.
In
retrospect, at the Battle at
Fiscal Cliff, Boehner took President Obama to the cleaners. He did it
suavely,
without histrionics. While Obama churlishly, and in a politically
amateurish
manner, publicly strutted about having forced the Republicans to raise
tax
rates on “the wealthiest Americans” Boehner, quietly, was pocketing his
winnings.
Dazzled
by Obama’s Ozymandias-scale
sneer most liberals failed to notice that Boehner quietly made 99% of
the Bush
tax cuts permanent. As Boehner himself dryly observed, in an interview
with The
Wall Street Journal’s editorial board member Steve Moore, “”Who would
have ever
guessed that we could make 99% of the Bush tax cuts permanent? When we
had a
Republican House and Senate and a Republican in the White House, we
couldn’t
get that. And so, not bad.’”
“Not
bad” is a resounding
understatement. Dealt a weak hand, Boehner managed to 99% outfox, on
tax
policy, a president who had the massive apparatus of the executive
branch, the
Senate majority, and a left-leaning national elite media whooping it up
for a
whopping tax increase. Even more impressively, Boehner pulled it off
with
steady nerves while under heavy pressure from the anti-spending hawks
in his
own caucus.
Boehner,
deftly, also dramatically
raised the threshold, on which Obama had campaigned, at which the
modest 3.6%
rate increase kicked in. Yet his biggest win may have been in making
the
Alternative Minimum Tax patch permanent. This changes the baseline with
profoundly positive implications for future tax reform and economic
growth.
Boehner
thereby won a triple
jackpot, a bonanza for conservatives and supply-siders … while Obama,
giving up
all that for a trivial symbolic victory, lost his Progressive shirt.
The
mainstream media, with a few exceptions such as Howard Kurtz at the
Daily Beast,
was too deep in the tank to report that the Emperor has no clothes.
But
Obama ended up, at least,
shirtless. Next … off come the pants. Here come the real spending cuts.
As
reported by Moore, Boehner privately told Obama “’Mr. President, we
have a very
serious spending problem.’ He repeated this message so often, he says,
that
toward the end of the negotiations, the president became irritated and
said:
‘I’m getting tired of hearing you say that.’”
Boehner,
last week, again bested
Obama by pushing the debt ceiling fight back to May. This is a double
whammy by
Boehner. According to specialists, by structuring the law to allow new
borrowing only to the extent of obligations “outstanding on May 19,
2013,
exceeds the face amount of such obligations outstanding on the date of
the
enactment of this Act” Boehner effectively instituted a spending
freeze. This,
in the face of Obama’s relentless demand for even more spending, is a
victory
for anti-profligacy hawks.
Read
the rest of the article at
Forbes
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