President Barack Obama’s embrace of the politically symbolic two-year freeze on federal government salaries aligns him with House Republican leaders and against unions, public workers and some leaders in his own party.
A winner of incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's YouCut online spending-cut poll in May, the proposal would require the House and Senate, at the last minute, to include the freeze in any long-term federal spending bill dealing with the slate of unfinished fiscal 2011 appropriations laws.
The president's adoption of a GOP proposal that goes straight to the ideological divide between the parties — the size, scope and value of government — could be an early sign of White House efforts to move toward the political center in advance of the 2012 election.
It infuriated union leaders, some rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers and even a handful of Republicans — few of whom saw it coming — and thus put the president squarely to the political right of liberals and other labor allies. The word "triangulation" — a reference to President Bill Clinton's practice of calibrating positions to distance him from both the political and left and the political right — floated through the corridors of Congress on Monday.
Listen, this guy despises union members and rank-and-file Dems.
Time and again - from the way the UAW got treated during the GM bailout to the way the Central Falls, Rhode Island teachers got treated as part of Obama's RttT policy to the way he has gone about the politics of this wage freeze announcement - it is quite clear that Obama thinks his future lies in selling out union members, rank-and-file Dems and other liberal constituencies.
I think we will see MUCH more of this in the coming months. I think we will hear MUCH more of this in the State of the Union in January.
And I think this bodes ill for the NCLB re-authorization after January.
You can bet teachers and union members will be sold down the river by Obama.
He seems to enjoy doing it.
I don't know that I'd call that moving toward the political center. More like the far right, pretty much the only place that exists anymore in American politics. And it won't win him those Sarah Palin votes he's after anyway.
ReplyDeleteSeems Prez Gimmick is determined to make us feel less & less sorry when he looses to Sarah Failin' in 2012. I doubt even if repugs believe in the cuts they voted for - it takes Prez Gimmick to give credibility to those words.
ReplyDeleteBailout Barrack can take comfort in one of his next to impossible achievments - that of bailing out Republican brand deep from inside the toilet. If we saw in 2010 that even Bush couldn't bailout Prez Gimmick, 2012 will prove even the specter of Prez Sarah Failin will fail to bail out Bailout Barrack.
If you thought Dems running away from Prez Gimmick was bad, wait until 2012 when he becomes a "toxic asset".
ReplyDeleteJudging by the numbers, I don't think Sarah has all that good a shot of winning the GOP nomination.
ReplyDeleteI would put a dollar down on either Romney or Pawlenty winning.
And then I think Obama does go down in 2012.
Unless the economy really turns around for EVERYBODY, not just Wall Streeters and hedge fund criminals like Whitney Tilson.