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Obama aims to scapegoat GOPers with spring offensive

Examiner Editorial
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March 15, 2009

- — White House officials launched a new propaganda effort yesterday on behalf of President Barack Obama’s massive federal budget deficits, doubling of the national debt and vast expansion of Washington’s bureaucracy. The new strategy recognizes two key results of the first 50 days of the Obama administration. First, the president seriously endangered his credibility by embracing the business-as-usual epitomized by earmarks in Washington. Second, instead of governing through the decision-making process he was elected to manage, Obama is shifting into partisan campaign mode to carry out his radical plans for America. So much for the candidate who promised a new post-partisan administration to move America beyond the old politics. Now, it’s going to be all old politics all the time.

Remember that Obama ran as the candidate who would go through the federal budget “line-by-line” to root out wasteful spending and earmarks. Instead, by letting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi write his economic recovery bill, Obama put the two most visible symbols of congressional spending excess in charge. They responded by sending him a $787 billion economic stimulus package and a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that together contained more than 17,000 earmarks. Instead of signing both measures, Obama should have vetoed them and demanded clean bills with no earmarks, a move that would have stopped the corrupt games in Congress and made the president a genuine hero. Consequently, his new promise to seek “earmark reform” for the future rings just as disingenuous and hollow as Reid and Pelosi did when they promised in 2006 to give Americans "the most honest and open Congress ever."

But Obama and his campaign brain trust of David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Robert Gibbs and Rahm Emanuel are nothing if not shrewd public opinion manipulators. As Politico’s Mike Allen reported over the weekend, they have a new strategy designed to shift attention away from “the charges of big spending [that] could stick to the president.” To re-direct public attention, the White House propagandists are peddling a new Big Lie – that Republicans always say no but never offer an alternative to the president’s $3.6 trillion budget proposal, with its historic deficits and generational theft on a grandiose scale. This is exactly what you would expect from a White House run by people who read Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” including number 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.” In other words, Obama's White House is unleashing tactics that go beyond negative to ugly.

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President Barack Obama , David Axelrod , Rahm Emanuel , David Plouffe , Robert Gibbs , White House , Democrats , Liberals , Saul Alinski , Rules for Radicals , The Washington Examiner

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Obama aims to scapegoat GOPers with spring offensive

Examiner Editorial - March 15, 2009

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Examiner Editorial
-
March 15, 2009