FoxNews.com posted a home page story this evening that began, \u201cPresident Obama pinned the blame on Republicans Tuesday for looming spending cuts that may be triggered by what was originally a White House proposal\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, duh.<\/p>\n
Hasn\u2019t staging one deadlock after another been the Obama White House\u2019s transparent game plan since Day One of Term Two?<\/p>\n
Wasn\u2019t that incredible inaugural address \u2013 the most radical second term curtain raiser since FDR\u2019s in 1937 \u2013 a signal that times of turbulence were on the administration\u2019s agenda?<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t seek common ground, as Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and, yes, George W. Bush did at the start of their second terms. \u00a0No. \u00a0Seek a climate of confrontation, then blame it on the Congressional GOP.<\/p>\n
It is all so easy, this White House strategy.<\/p>\n
Offer to talk, but plant a poison pill in every proposal.<\/p>\n
Maybe that pill is the insistence on more taxes after the GOP gave at the fiscal cliff.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s the president telling John Boehner that the nation has no spending problem — saying this when deficits are running a trillion dollars a year and, according to multiple media reports, much of the world is counting the days before the United States has borrowed itself into insignificance.<\/p>\n
Maybe it is leaking the president\u2019s immigration program so it can blow like a hurricane across the political landscape at just the time that a bipartisan Congressional immigration proposal, like a newborn colt, is struggling to rise on wobbly legs.<\/p>\n
Oh, wait, that\u2019s right; distributing the draft plan all through the administration was not a leak. \u00a0My, oh, my, did it land in the hands of reporters? \u00a0I cannot imagine how.<\/p>\n
The point is, that somehow, some way, the president and his staff always find a way to make deals that could work, not work.<\/p>\n
Over the weekend, Senator Rand Paul was interviewed on one of the Sunday morning shows. Senator Paul is comparatively new to Washington and in policy debates a tough cookie. \u00a0But clearly he understands that there is a way to get things done when you have a large collection of tough and committed men and women, each with his or her own constituencies and convictions. \u00a0He told the interviewer, \u201cThis is not the way things are done,\u201d meaning you cannot bring people together to pass legislation operating in the manner the president and his team are operating.<\/p>\n
By the way, recognizing that the opposition has convictions, too, is part of making things work in Washington. For despite what we hear, a man or woman of conviction in this capital city is not like Groucho Marx\u2019s man of convictions. \u00a0You know: \u201cI have convictions. \u00a0If you don\u2019t like them, I have other convictions.\u201d<\/p>\n
So a successful president like Ronald Reagan spends time listening and flattering and telling laugh-out-loud stories to the crowd on Capitol Hill \u2013 and has a staff that more or less does the same.<\/p>\n
To date, the Obama crowd has had a free ride with its legislative boorishness. \u00a0But I question if that will continue.<\/p>\n
I gave a number of interviews in the days before and after the State of the Union address \u2013 newspapers, radio, TV, in other words, the circuit. \u00a0I made basically the same argument I am making here. \u00a0I expected push back. \u00a0You know, \u201cBut isn\u2019t the atmosphere of confrontation the fault of Republican obstruction?\u201d \u00a0And, yes, I got a little, but surprisingly little. And when I pointed out the president\u2019s in-your-face history with Congressional Republicans, they backed off.<\/p>\n
Still, I can\u2019t help feeling it\u2019s really a shame. \u00a0The nation could have had a broad bipartisan compromise on entitlement reform and maybe even discretionary spending restraint in the later Clinton years. \u00a0Bill\u2019s narcissistic romp with Monica Lewinski killed that. \u00a0We might have had it under George W. Bush, too \u2013 but the War on Terror and the deteriorating situations in Iraq and Afghanistan ended any hope of Social Security or other domestic spending reforms.<\/p>\n
And now we have a president who looks at spending that has reached a peacetime record 25 percent of GDP and says, it is not enough, not even close. \u00a0And blames the Republicans.<\/p>\n
What do they say? God protects children, foolish drunks and the United States of American. \u00a0The way we\u2019re going, we\u2019ll need His hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
FoxNews.com posted a home page story this evening that began, \u201cPresident Obama pinned the blame on Republicans Tuesday for looming spending cuts that may be triggered by what was originally a White House proposal\u2026.\u201d Well, duh. Hasn\u2019t staging one deadlock after another been the Obama White House\u2019s transparent game plan since Day One of Term […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[125,94,124,50,60,123,59],"class_list":["post-1514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-cliff","tag-economy","tag-gdp","tag-gop","tag-obama","tag-paul","tag-sotu"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1515,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions\/1515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}