Whichever way the debate over the debt limit plays out, one thing is certain: Obama will still be chief executive after August 2. In the end the only way to keep him from turning the Tea Party-backed Republicans into scapegoats for ruining the economy will be to back off, as Mitch McConnell said, and make the president own the disaster. We are in the midst of a political war; we have to use "other means" to win it.
The tea partiers have our country's best interests at heart, but they're naïve about the left if they don't recognize how Obama can spin a crisis to make them out to be the bad guys. Sarah Palin said McConnell's plan "makes no sense"; maybe in a normal world where two plus two equals four.
But everything is topsy-turvy, so sincerity and logic have to give way to a strategy which concludes the president will do anything to discredit the Tea Party. The national conservative movement is the only thing standing in the way of the administration's all out socialist transformation of our economy.
Spengler, a political columnist for the Asia Times, lays out a believable scenario where Obama wins the endgame by allowing the Republicans to take the fall for a debt ceiling crisis where he becomes the savior.
In his latest article, Spengler writes:
The Tea Party movement may be marching into a political ambush, in which Obama will be able to portray the born-again budget-cutters as irresponsible fanatics who threaten to tip America into a new depression. The now unpopular president then would assume the role of national savior in time of crisis. [snip]
The Republicans, rather than shutting down the government, should say something like this:
President Obama has doubled the national debt. If we do nothing, the national debt will rise by another $3 trillion, even if you elect a Republican president in 2012 on a program of fiscal responsibility. You the people elected a Republican majority in the House in order to stop this from happening. We have offered a workable plan to the President, but he demands things that we know our constituents don't want - tax increases to fund white-elephant pet projects like high-speed rail. He is threatening to shut down the government in order to get a tax increase. The trouble is that he's the president, and he can do it. So we are offering him authority to continue borrowing. The 2012 election will be a referendum on this country's economic future. It's tragic that we have to lose an opportunity to staunch the bleeding right now, but that's how our constitutional system works. [snip]
The winning strategy is to keep the blame for failure on Obama through November 2012.
To back up Spengler's claims, all we need to do is to reference the opposition's own words. As a result of last week's pushback by Obama against the hard line GOP no taxes stance, New York Times reports the Republican Party "found itself falling back on two less-palatable options instead: either a procedural gimmick that would try to pin the responsibility for raising the ceiling on President Obama, or a stand on principle that would risk plunging the American economy back into recession."
Didn't Alinsky teach his minions about ridiculing the opposition? Just laugh at them to make them look foolish? They know full well about using "gimmicks," so who better to tell us how to fight? HuffPo is running a piece on the Tea Party's debt plan with a picture of a supporter in Colonial era attire as if to say nobody should take this movement for real. Mocking, mocking, mocking to discredit legitimate people.
If the Tea Party and the GOP can actually suspend their conservative thinking for a moment -- by looking at these debt negotiations from the mind's eye of the left -- they'll get the last laugh.
Read more of Ann Kane's commentaries on Potter Williams Report
Print
Comments
Share
