WASHINGTON – The embargoed fact sheet from the White House is interesting. What’s been reported in the Washington Post this morning and other venues gets it about right, though in some of the most vital areas concerning progressives Pres. Obama is, in his typical style, vague. The “on background” call with the Administration should be interesting.
To update you… The following is what the White House sanctioned for release prior to Pres. Obama’s speech today: The President is setting a goal of reducing our deficit by $4 trillion in 12 years or less, phased in over time. Pres. Obama’s full fact sheet is now available.
Wall Street honchos, as well as Tea Party Republicans, know how to play hard ball with their own interests, and so does Pres. Obama when it comes to his own reelection, with his speech today simply a document out of his 2012 playbook.
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As Grover Norquist explained yesterday, around 270 Republicans in the House and Senate have signed a no tax pledge, so whatever is going on right now isn’t about dealing with the debt or deficit seriously. As always, it remains about ideology on the Right, which is why it’s so easy to play Pres. Obama, who has no guiding principle or ideology to follow, with his guiding light his reelection. Independents are his guide, the majority of which are conservative, though his leadership is making a whole lot of those from Democrats.
The biggest problem for U.S. economic futures is that Pres. Obama continues to ignore revenue and jobs, because he doesn’t have one clue how to inspire economic growth. This is the sad reality the Democratic Party is facing, as Pres. Obama continues to pull us all rightward.
Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) this week said Obama should start acting like a Democrat, while two left-wing grassroots groups warned their members could withhold funds from the president’s reelection campaign. The criticisms highlight the problem facing Obama, who is trying to lead from the center without alienating his political base. The White House strategy could help the president with independents, but risks leaving liberals at home in the fall of 2012. – Left’s angst grows over Obama’s shift to the political center
Pres. Obama has made the Right the political center. I’ve been writing about this for over a year, so all I can say is I told you so.
To understand just how bad Pres. Obama is on managing the Democratic message (and his own fiscal policy) you really must go back to before the Bush tax cuts were extended last year, when all the cable yakkers, including the usual suspects on “Morning Joe,” minus Mika who stayed focus on reality. Because Pres. Obama didn’t want to rile up Republicans and have a bad ending to 2010, he and Democrats caved and extended the Bush tax cuts. Now there’s scuttlebutt on today’s Obama’s reelection speech on deficit reduction, that he will propose rescinding Bush tax cuts above $250,000. This proposal is not only too late, but a monumental fantasy, because the Republican House and their friends in the Senate will never suck that up, because they don’t have to anymore and have pledged not to. By compromising and capitulating in December, to wild applause let me add, Pres. Obama can now only jabber about tax cuts from the wealthy that should be reversed, but in reality should never have been given.
With Republicans in control in the House and the wind at the Tea Party’s back, it’s easy for Pres. Obama to talk about it, because he doesn’t have to walk the walk. That will hit the audience he’s aiming for, Independents, because after all this is simply a reelection speech.
Taylor Marsh is a Washington based political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics, foreign policy, and women in power. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog.