Glory be. The President’s got guts. America awoke after the Bin Laden killing to a new appreciation of his cool, decisive, risk taking leadership style and a rug had been yanked out from under a key GOP strategy…to paint the President as a likeable, indecisive, professorial wimp. Immediately, Republicans fell back on their remaining ace in the hole…the economy. They are not stupid. They looked at the poll numbers and America grumbling about high gas prices and an anemic recovery.
John Boehner, Speaker of the House, kicked off their strategy of renewed focus on economy at an economics forum May 10. Will he have committed a boner?
The Boehner address reminded me of that old camp sing song: “same song, second verse; could get better but it’s gonna get worse”. He renewed holding hostage raising the debt ceiling to terms that were mostly more of the same as yore, , only adding zeros to some figures and adding twists that others had long ago dissed .
The prior GOP hostage deal had been they would lift the debt ceiling only if the President would present a “serious debt reduction plan”. The President proposed one, but the Republicans s either acted as if it never happened or dismissed it as “gimmicks and deflections”. Those are certainly ways to avoid a side by side comparison of plans. Perhaps they feared whatever they proposed to date would not survive such scrutiny.
Republicans probably hoped you would not remember that the Obama proposal would reduce the deficit by nearly the same as the plan House Republicans just approved , without destroying Medicare as we know it . The key provision of the Obama plan, a trigger to force Congress to reduce the deficit by 2014 , was simply blown off by Boehner as , oops, it did not rule out tax hikes and we needed to be specific about cuts now.
Now Boehner raised the hostage terms from cutting billions to cutting trillions, but the rest looks just like before…with a twist or two. Read Boehner’s lips, too, “no new taxes”. Only cuts are acceptable. This is in spite of Obama’s plan proposing three dollars in cuts for every one dollar in tax hikes. The Simpson-Bowles debt commission and the gang of six in the Senate, including some heavy weight Republicans, came to the conclusion we could not reduce the deficit significantly without some tax increases. Even expert arm’s length observers writing in London’s Financial Times and on TV opined relying only on cuts was political fantasy.
Still on the table is the Ryan plan, in spite of some Republicans and the Tea Party running away from the proposal they voted for which would substitute guaranteed Medicare benefits with vouchers that contain no guarantees it would keep up with escalating costs. The GOP still proposes to kill “Obamacare”, thus eliminating health care cost containment provisions of the law, removing the $400 billion it saves to the Medicare system , and restoring the donut hole in drug benefits charged to seniors.
However, Boehner did try to sidestep the Ryan proposal by saying that everything is on the table except tax increases. What was new on the table was also warmed over dinner: revival of the old GOP proposal to cut Medicare benefits to the wealthy. This is no more than a riff on the old GOP song proposing of means testing to determine who would be able to receive benefits .
A boner Boehner may have committed is his insistence on Republicans being specific about what cuts they intend to make. There are plenty of oxen that could get gored, providing ripe targets for Democrats to make poster children of GOP heartlessness.
Another boner is that the hostage he insists holding, raising the deficit ceiling, is one they dare not kill off because it would wreck the economy. Most Republicans know it and do not care to have it haunt them in 2012.
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