This has not been a good week for President Obama’s campaign to use $44 billion in automatic spending cuts as leverage to force Republicans to vote for higher taxes. First, legendary journalist Bob Woodward dismantled the White House’s account of how the sequester was created. Now, Woodward is telling Politico that the White House responded by threatening him if he went forward with his claim.
Then Education Secretary Arne Duncan was caught in a baldfaced lie about the sequester causing teacher layoffs. On Face the Nation last Sunday Duncan told CBS, “As many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs. … There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall.” But when pressed to identify which teachers are “literally” getting pink slips right now, Duncan could only name one country in West Virginia. And when The Washington Post followed up with the director of federal programs for that county, she said that while five to six teachers were being laid off, those layoffs had nothing to do with the sequester. In fact, they were caused by a previous White House decision to cut funding for ineffective Head Start programs.
