Two long time Democrats - Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell -- echo what many in the Republican party are saying about the president and the sequester; it's a ploy to "obliterate" the GOP.
Politico:
The president is obviously going all-out -- but not to avoid the $85 billion in spending cuts, known as the sequester, set to kick in on Friday. Obama doesn't want to make a deal with Republicans. His fear-mongering is part of a concerted plan that extends far beyond the sequester crisis: to obliterate the Republican Party as a viable force in American political life.
His self-righteous rhetoric obscures a bitter truth: Obama is not trying to unite the country. He's waging a class-based battle for political gain. His goal is to win back the House for Democrats in 2014, giving him a united Congress for his last two years in office and allowing him to pursue the most expansive government in American history.
Listening to Obama, an ordinary American might assume that the Republicans were forcing these harsh spending cuts on the president. In fact, they were the president's idea, part of a compromise to make the 2011 debt-ceiling deal. And as Bob Woodward reminded readers in an op-ed last on Sunday, that agreement did not include the "new revenue" (i.e., tax hikes) that Obama pretends he asked for then: "When the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts....that was not the deal he made."
Obama, then, is not being truthful -- nor is he making even minimal efforts to find a compromise with Republicans. It actually made news last week when the White House made a few perfunctory calls to GOP leaders.
So here we are again, stuck in America's ongoing political groundhog day: Obama makes the same claims, with the same results. Republicans dig in, vow no more compromises, then surrender wholesale. Neither side levels with the American people or speaks to their real anxieties -- from rising food and gas prices to chronic and pervasive unemployment.
Is the president really out to destroy the Republican party? It's a controversial theory, largely because most political observers believe it is impossible to accomplish. It would be a foolish waste of the president's political capital to make the attempt, although a consequence of his strategy may be a Republican meltdown if the leadership caves on the sequester or on the government shut down later this month. More to the point, Obama wants to divide and conquer the Republicans. "Obliterate" is too much of an exaggeration.
The party is just too strong at the state and local level to destroy. If national Republicans can't get their act together, there are several governors who can step into the leadership void. Also, back bench Congressmen as well as personalities like Marco Rubio aren't going anywhere. The core of the GOP is solid and Obama would be nuts to think that he could engineer some kind of systemic collapse so that Republicans end up a permanent minority.
Besides, the GOP is doing fine destroying itself without any help from the president. With the Tea Party threatening to primary any Republican who criticizes them, and the establishment's epic failure to coherently oppose the president's agenda, the GOP is having itself a gay old time tearing itself to pieces.
And the president is only too happy to help the process along.
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky
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