Apparently, it has nothing to do with having no choice in breaking yet another promise to his unhinged rich people hating base: Obama’s tax cut extension part of strategy to show bipartisanship
Although his liberal supporters are furious about the decision, President Obama’s willingness to extend all of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts is part of what White House officials say is a deliberate strategy: to demonstrate his ability to compromise with Republicans and portray the president as the last reasonable man in a sharply partisan Washington.
The move is based on a political calculation, drawn from his party’s midterm defeat, that places a premium on winning back independent voters.
Uh huh. Supposedly, this came from hours of beer meetings based on the loss of independents during the mid-terms. Right, considering that Team Obama has been in a fog of cluelessness over why they lost the mid-terms, generally ending with “our messaging was bad.”
In doing so, Obama is trying to make the best of a bad situation. Administration officials now say that restoring the president’s image as a post-partisan leader is more important for the next two years of his term and for his reelection effort.
So, simply a continuation of their policy of “appearances over smart policy”, because it is All About Obama.
Meanwhile, Katrina vanden Heuvel is having a snit fit: Obama: On the way to a failed presidency?
Ronald Reagan famously quipped that the Democratic Party left him before he left the party. Like many progressive supporters of Barack Obama, I’m beginning to have the same feeling about this president.
Hey, Katrina, you certainly make more than $250K a year: you paid at the higher rate Obama wants you to pay, right?
Forget about electoral mandates or campaign promises. This president has a historic mandate. Just as Abraham Lincoln had to lead the nation from slavery and Franklin Roosevelt from the Depression, this president must lead the nation from the calamitous failures of three decades of conservative dominance. This requires beginning to reverse the perverse tax policies that have contributed to gilded-age inequality and starved the government of resources needed for vital investments. This demands correcting destabilizing global imbalances, laying a new foundation for reviving American manufacturing and shackling financial speculation. It means ensuring the United States leads rather than lags in the green industrial revolution. And it requires unwinding the self-destructive military adventures abroad. The president must strengthen America’s basic social contract in a global economy, not weaken it.
Um, woah? A historic mandate? Seriously? She actually compares Obama to Lincoln, who freed the slaves? Seriously times two? I guess she has forgotten about William Clinton and all the time Liberals controlled the House and Senate. And, apparently, she still believes him to be The Lightworker. There is simply so much wrong with that paragraph, and only so much time in the day.
Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU. sit back and Relax. we’ll dRive!
I used to be of the camp that believed Obama was a smart person (he is a lawyer) and he really did love this country. He just had a different opinion on what direction our country should be going. (typical democrat)
I then moved to the camp that believes he is just a stupid sock puppet for the power-brokers behind the scenes bent on crushing this country.
I am now in the camp that Obama is a smart person who has put in place powerful power-brokers to help him destroy this country!!!!
That is the only way I can explain his going along, or agreeing to, or pushing the idea of, the 2% reduction in payroll taxes.
While I like the idea of reducing taxes, there is no way in hell this SOCIALIST would ever agree to it. He has spent his entire career pulling money out of someone else’s pockets. He has worked to suplant our government with a form of tyrannical Socialism.
He campaigned for eliminating these “bush tax cuts” in order to increase taxes on the “rich”. He even said so recently. But now he is for reducing payroll taxes?
The only way this makes sense, is that HE KNOWS that this will increase the DEBT. And it will of course. His plan is to crash our system to the point that we need to ask for help from the European Socialists whom we’ve already been bailing out.
Once our system crashes and people are forced to live off-grid for a few months, people would be clammering for implementing any kind of government to save them.