We hereby present this certificate of hypocrisy to Republicans who’ve been blasting President Barack Obama over a concession he made to them. It’s yet another sign of our hyper-partisan, hyper-ideologist times.
It has been said many times before the past several months, but it’s worth saying again: rebranding reshmanding. The New Republic notes:
Want to know whether bipartisan compromise on the budget has a future? Then watch very clearly over the next few days, to see whether Republican leaders distance themselves from Republican Congressman Greg Walden—and whether Walden himself walks back some rhetoric from yesterday.
Walden, from Oregon, is chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
So he’s not — to use conservative talker’s favorite name for Joe Scarborough — an average political “shmo.”
And after President Obama released his budget Wednesday, he was quick to attack it. By itself, that was unexceptional: Pretty much every Republican leader spent the day criticizing it. But most Republicans stuck to the familiar arguments conservatives make against Democratic budgets—that it calls for too much spending and too many taxes. Walden went after something else: Obama’s proposal to reduce Social Security benefits.
By now, you’re probably familiar with the proposal, which would change the inflation formula that government uses to calculate a variety of benefit and tax levels. Wonks call it “Chained CPI,” with CPI standing for “consumer price index.” Many experts believe the Chained CPI would better reflect true inflation, because consumers, when faced with higher prices, substitute cheaper goods. But it’s still a benefit cut and many experts also believe that some consumers, the elderly among them, are less able to adapt.1 Obama has said he would support the measure only in exchange for concessions, such as higher taxes on the wealthy and spending on infrastructure. Even so, he’s taken all kinds of grief over the idea from the left, where the idea remains highly unpopular, even in the abstract.
For that reason alone, endorsing the CPI change represents a major concession, albeit one Obama had made previously in private and then in public. And it’s a concession that, on multiple occasions, Republicans have insisted Obama make formally, in the budget, as a show of good faith. Now he has done that. Yet the ink was barely dry on the budget before Walden went after it, not because it was insufficient but because it would hurt the elderly. “A shocking attack on seniors,” he called it.
The fact that Walden is in charge of the committee that will coordinate congressional campaigns for Republicans in 2014 is significant here, because it foreshadows a campaign in which Obama, having accepted an entitlement cut that conservatives demand, gets attacked for it. We’ve seen this play out before—in 2010 and 2012, when Obama and Democrats came under merciless attack for cuts to Medicare, as part of the Affordable Care Act, no less harsh than cuts Republicans were simultaneously advocating. Sure enough, Walden linked the two during an interview with CNN.
And so it goes.
To Mr. Walden we proudly present the certificate above. He has worked hard to earn it and we’re sure he’ll inspire many other Republicans to follow his example.
Unless polls show it won’t work.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.