Is the GOP playing Obama?

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 20:35:00 +0000

There's no real mystery about why House Speaker John Boehner and his allies keep screaming about wanting spending cuts, but never propose any: The kinds of cuts they are known to want, like raising the eligibility age and/or means-testing Social Security and Medicare, are wildly unpopular. So on Thursday Boehner held a ranting press conference where he railed about "spending" but didn't propose one single cut.

On MSNBC's "Now With Alex" (guest-hosted by the great Joy-Ann Reid), congressional correspondent Luke Russert told the unvarnished truth about why the party that's for cuts won't lay any out. Reid asked Russert: "Do Republicans really feel that putting forward entitlement cuts will make them more popular with the American people?"

And Russert, who has good GOP sources, explained their logic:

If they have entitlement cuts as part of this deal, they would make it, through their marketing ways, and they're better communications operatives than Democrats, that the president would own the entitlement cuts. They're not worried about that. They would say "the president owns that" in 2014 and 2016.

Look at how they did that with the defense cuts as part of the sequester. Remember those ads that Romney ran, that Republicans ran: "These are the president's defense cuts"? They'd do the same thing: "These are the president's entitlement cuts." They don't worry about that at all.

Salon.com > Entitlement cuts

Is the GOP playing Obama?