Here’s the full video of President Barack Obama’s statement on the Fiscal Cliff negotiations. GOPers were reportedly unhappy with his sometimes mocking tone:
The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein puts it into perspective:
President Obama’s cheerful, mocking statement enraged Republicans. But the bigger problem is he said something Republican leaders have been trying to hide from their members. Obama said, clearly, that if the GOP wants more spending cuts later, they’re going to need to hand over more taxes, too. In fact, he said it repeatedly.
He made the point when talking about the sequester……..And then he made it again when talking about Medicare cuts….
Obama “just moved the goalpost again. Significantly,” tweeted Mitch McConnell’s spokesman.
That’s really why Obama’s comments posed a threat to a deal. The GOP’s congressional leaders want to tell their members that if they just vote for this modest tax increase now, then they can move onto the debt ceiling, where their enhanced leverage will let them force a deal that’s all spending cuts. Obama, in effect, said that’s not true. He said if Republicans raise taxes now, he’s going to pocket that tax increase and demand tax increases in the next deal, too.
Obama likely needed to say that. Republicans have had so much trouble wrangling their members in recent years that we forget that congressional Democrats can stage revolts, too.
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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.