The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (7 page)

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Authors: David Limbaugh

BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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Conveniently forgetting his own record-setting pace for presidential golf, he returned to his tried and true meme of lazy Republicans. “These are bills that Congress ran up,” he claimed. “They took the vacation, they bought the car, and now they are saying maybe we don’t have to pay. At a certain point they need to do their job.”
24
His chutzpah in portraying himself as an innocent bystander amidst the spiraling national debt was breathtaking. But he wasn’t through. When asked if he would sign on to a compromise involving tax breaks, he replied, “I’ve said to Republican leaders, ‘You go talk to your constituents and ask them: Are you willing to compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate jet owner can get a tax break.’” After pulling the work ethic and class warfare cards, he couldn’t resist throwing in a little scaremongering, claiming the Republicans wanted to “pay the Chinese, but not seniors.”
25
An exchange between a reporter and White House press secretary Jay Carney over the budget battles during the summer of 2011 revealed the administration’s bizarre view of bipartisanship. The reporter asked Carney how the president’s rallying people to call on Republican congressmen to compromise promoted “an atmosphere of bipartisanship.” The reported asked, “Does that foster a sense of cooperation?” Carney responded, “What the President has called for is for those Americans who believe that we need compromise in Washington to communicate that to their members of Congress. That can be Democrats or Republicans. That is hardly a partisan message. It is explicitly a bipartisan message.” When the reporter reminded Carney that only Republican congressmen were being called out, he responded, “Well, I think the problem we’ve seen here is a lack of willingness to compromise by Republicans.”
26
In other words, the failure of both sides to agree to Obama’s plan was a result of Republican partisanship; Obama’s refusal to compromise did not constitute partisanship because his proposals were eminently reasonable.
Over and over, by refusing to condemn rancorous language from Democrats, Obama proved his calls for civility were insincere and politically motivated. Obama was silent amidst reports that Congressman Mike Doyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said in a closed-door meeting in reference to tea party Republicans, “We have negotiated with terrorists. This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.” Biden reportedly responded, “They have acted like terrorists.”
27
Biden later denied saying this, though there was no denying his comment to Senate Democrats earlier in the day that Republican leaders have “guns to their heads” in the budget negotiations, and that the deal would remove the tea party’s “weapon of mass destruction”—referring to the threat of defaulting on U.S. debt obligations, which was an unlikely sceneario anyway, as explained in chapter six. Continuing to employ the precise kind of martial language the Left had denounced after the Giffords shooting, Doyle told
Politico
that Republicans “have no compunction about blowing up the economy to get what they want.”
28
DEFLECTION: A VALUED SKILL FOR TEAM OBAMA
Vice President Biden found a trip to China to be a suitable occasion for attacking the tea party. When asked about the administration’s efforts to reduce the deficit following the Standard & Poor’s downgrade, Biden blamed everything on conservative opposition to Obama’s agenda. Biden said that Medicare (and other entitlements) would be easy to fix, “but there is a group within the Republican Party that is a very strong voice now that wanted different changes, and so the deal fell through at the very end.” As Britain’s Nile Gardiner observed, Biden was saying the administration had a perfect plan to deal with the deficit but the tea party ruined it: “What he doesn’t mention, of course, is that his own administration is responsible for an unprecedented increase in government spending, and running the largest deficits since World War II.”
30
But Obama was in sync with Biden, calling the credit downgrade “a self-inflicted wound” by Republicans. He added, “That’s why people are frustrated. You can hear it in my voice; that’s why I’m frustrated.”
31
Obama did not make these comments simply in the heat of the moment; he keeps up his attack on Republicans, rain or shine. While stumping for his jobs bill in Michigan, he blasted the GOP Congress for “the worst part of partisanship, the worst part of gridlock.” “There are some in Congress right now,” charged Obama, “who would rather see their opponents lose than Americans win, and that’s got to stop. We’re supposed to all be on the same team, especially during tough times.” Once again, he urged his audience to write members of Congress (meaning Republicans) to urge them to pass his jobs bill.
32
Still trying to divert attention from his own record, his own hyper-partisanship, and his own stubborn aversion to compromise, he kept trying to leverage Congress’ poor public approval ratings (Congress, it should be noted, almost always rates poorly, no matter which party is in control) to push his agenda. In his weekly radio address a few days later, he lashed out at “partisan gridlock.” As if he were wholly outside the political process, he said, “You’ve got a right to be frustrated. I am. Because you deserve better. I don’t think it’s too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering.” He then urged Americans—yet again—to contact members of Congress.
33
Months later, in October, he was still at it. “The question then is, will Congress do something?” he intoned. “If Congress does something, then I can’t run against a do-nothing Congress. If Congress does nothing, then it’s not a matter of me running against them, I think the American people will run them out of town. Because they are frustrated.”
No matter how he spun it, though, the Republican Congress had passed Paul Ryan’s reform plan, the “cut, cap and balance bill,” and countless other reforms only to have them die in the Democrat-controlled Senate or at the threat of a presidential veto. Try as he might, he could not explain away the fact that he was the one who had spurned the recommendations of his own Bipartisan Budget Commission, who had failed to present any good faith legislation aimed at curbing entitlement spending, whose budget deficits were in excess of a trillion dollars as far as the eye could see, whose stimulus packages were bankrupting us, and whose Senate hadn’t submitted a budget for some 900 days.
That same month, at a private fundraiser in Tampa, Florida, First Lady Michelle Obama engaged in some old-fashioned scaremongering, reminding her audience that Obama’s Supreme Court nominees would help craft decisions whose impact would be felt “for decades to come—on our privacy and security, on whether we speak freely, worship openly, and love whomever we choose. That is what’s at stake here.”
34
Apparently, a Republican president would install justices who would prevent us from speaking, worshiping, and loving freely. In the Obamas’ eyes, the GOP boogeyman knows no bounds.
“THEY GOT A WAR WITH US”
Obama’s closest allies regularly hurl the most belligerent accusations at Republicans as Obama stands on the sidelines, pretending to be above it all. Consider the introduction Obama received from Jimmy Hoffa during a Labor Day address to union members in Detroit. Urging his audience to vote out Republican lawmakers who were blocking Obama’s agenda, the Teamster president unleashed a bellicose speech full of allusions to war and violence. He declared,
After those incendiary remarks, Obama bounced up to the podium, grinning widely, and proceeded to shower Hoffa with accolades. During his speech, Obama’s tone was less violent, but no less partisan. He said, “We’re going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party. You say you’re the party of tax cuts? Well then, prove you’ll fight just as hard for tax cuts for middle-class families as you do for oil companies and the most affluent Americans. Show us what you got.”
36
Obama later professed not to have heard Hoffa’s war-like comments. Some observers found this explanation improbable, but it was certainly unsurprising, considering Obama claims never to have heard Jeremiah Wright’s rantings though he sat through twenty years of his reverend’s “G—D– America” sermons. As criticism of Hoffa intensified over the ensuing week, Obama seemed to absolve himself of any responsibility to condemn uncivil speech from his allies; his communications chief Dan Pfeiffer defiantly declared Obama would not “serve as the speech police for the Democratic Party.”
37
On September 8, the day of his vaunted jobs speech, Obama demonstrated his “bipartisanship” by circulating advance talking points to liberal media and Democratic legislators. It wasn’t just his selective release of speech highlights that reeked of partisanship, however; the talking points themselves were chock full of it. They telegraphed that Obama would depict the economy as a casualty of President George W. Bush—this was
two and a half years
into Obama’s term, mind you—and that Republicans were, in the words of the
Daily Caller
, “unpatriotic and greedy partisans,” while Obama himself was “an optimistic, fair-minded, reformist, bipartisan, fiscal moderate.”
38
“WE DON’T BELIEVE IN A SMALL AMERICA”
Once again contradicting Obama’s calls for a “new tone” in politics, Team Obama developed a plan to harshly attack Mitt Romney after he emerged in 2011 as the frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination. In August, under the headline, “Obama Plan: Destroy Romney,”
Politico
revealed that “Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background.” The story quoted a prominent Democratic strategist closely tied to the White House, who said bluntly, “Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney.”
39
As
NewsBusters
‘ Tim Graham quipped, “There was no, ‘I mean, politically,’ in that sentence. Should the Secret Service be calling Politico for leads?”
40
While Obama’s advisers denied it, the
Politico
piece also suggested the Obama camp would try to paint Romney as a weird person who just happens to be a Mormon. As
Politico
noted, “The step from casting Romney as a bit off to raising questions about religion may not be a large step for some of the incumbent’s supporters.”
The focus on Romney by no means left other GOP presidential candidates immune from the Left’s attacks. Actress Janeane Garofalo voiced suspicions that Herman Cain had been paid by an unknown entity to enter the presidential contest solely to deflect attention from the party’s racism.
41
And Tim Pawlenty received an ungracious kick just after dropping out of the race, with Democratic National Committee Communications Director Brad Woodhouse announcing, “While protecting tax breaks for the wealthy and big oil while proposing to end Medicare, slash Social Security and pile additional burdens on the middle class might win plaudits with the Tea Party, it’s not remotely what the American people are looking for.”
42
The whole slate of GOP presidential candidates came under fire after they failed to immediately denounce one or two audience members at a GOP debate in Orlando who booed for about one second when a gay soldier asked a question about the military’s policies toward gays. Some of the candidates later said they didn’t hear the booing; others thought it was directed at the solder’s challenging question, not at him personally. Nevertheless, despite his refusal to condemn the inflammatory remarks of Hoffa—a close political ally who made his comments in the act of introducing Obama himself—Obama wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to denounce the entire GOP field.
At the Human Rights Campaign’s annual dinner, Obama attributed the incident in Orlando to Republicans’ fundamental lack of morality, compassion, or tolerance, which supposedly drives their entire agenda and their opposition to his own. His speech frequently decried “small America,” which he depicted as a cruel, dystopian place where roads and schools are allowed to crumble, teachers are laid off, and where the government irresponsibly cuts social services while handing out tax breaks for the rich. In case it wasn’t already clear that “small America” was code for the Republican agenda, Obama clarified the point by invoking the Orlando debate: “We don’t believe in the kind of smallness that says it’s okay for a stage full of political leaders—one of whom could end up being the President of the United States—being silent when an American soldier is booed. We don’t believe in that. We don’t believe in standing silent when that happens. We don’t believe in them being silent since.”
43
That was a sweeping indictment of Republicans, but Obama’s swipes can also be exceedingly petty, such as his scheduling of a joint session of Congress to unveil his jobs bill at the same time Republicans would be debating at the Reagan Presidential Library. When questioned about the timing, White House press secretary Jay Carney said the Republican debate was “not enough of a reason” to change the timing of the president’s speech.
So here we had Obama, insisting that Republican leaders dutifully serve as public props for another presidential reelection campaign speech in the guise of a new jobs bill, and at the same time telling Republicans he didn’t respect their ideas enough to avoid a scheduling conflict that would force Americans to choose between listening to the president or his Republican opponents.
44
But GOP leaders in Congress resisted Obama’s scheduling demand, forcing him to reschedule his bipartisan jobs harangue. After all, the president, according to Carney, was only interested in “speaking to people, speaking to Congress about the need to do things, to create jobs to get the economy going. Americans,” said Carney, “are sick and tired of the bickering, the gridlock.”
45
“THEY’D LOVE TO SEE [US] HANGING ON A TREE”
The Democrats’ attacks on the GOP reached farcical extremes. Vice President Biden told an audience in Toledo, Ohio, “This is a different kind of fight. This is a fight for the heart and soul of the labor movement. This is a fight for the existence of organized labor. You are the only folks keeping the barbarians at the gate.”
47
In perhaps the single most incendiary remark of the campaign, Congressional Black Caucus whip Andre Carson told the crowd at a CBC town hall meeting in Miami, “Some of these folks in Congress right now would love to see us as second-class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now with this tea party movement would love to see you and me—I’m sorry, Tamron—hanging on a tree.”
48
Meanwhile, Obama continued urging his supporters to give his congressional opponents an earful, but he didn’t take kindly when the tables were turned on him. At a public meeting, Iowa tea party member Ryan Rhodes confronted Obama about Biden’s alleged characterization of tea partiers as terrorists. Obama said Biden had denied making the statement, but then assumed a defensive posture, saying, “Now, in fairness, since I’ve been called a socialist who wasn’t born in this country, who is destroying America and taking away its freedoms because I passed a health care bill, I’m all for lowering the rhetoric.”
49
Obama may be all for ratcheting down the rhetoric when he’s the target, but like clockwork, within days, he was slamming Republicans again. Vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, he pointedly said, “The only thing preventing us from passing these bills is the refusal by some in Congress to put country ahead of party. That’s the problem right now. That’s what’s holding this country back.”
50
“REPUBLICAN LEADERS IN WASHINGTON JUST DON’T GET IT”
When Obama delivered his vaunted “jobs speech” at his rescheduled joint session of Congress, it turned out to be little more than a demand for another stimulus package inside a glorified campaign speech for his reelection. After scandal, waste, and failure had discredited his first stimulus plan, he was insisting that we do more of the same. Obama knew Republicans would never go along with his jobs plan, so his purpose in proposing it was to set Republicans up as obstructionists, hoping to use this as a campaign Hail Mary to distract the electorate’s attention from his record.
After his petty speech, Obama acted as though Republican opposition to the bill was all that was preventing a robust economic rebound. He had used the same ploy a year earlier during a weekly radio address in which he had plugged another so-called jobs bill that would extend unemployment benefits and give states billions in fiscal relief. Obama said then, “Republican leaders in Washington just don’t get it. While a majority of Senators support taking these steps to help the American people, some are playing the same old Washington games and using their power to hold this relief hostage—a move that only ends up holding back our recovery. It doesn’t make sense.”
52
Obama’s political strategy is really pretty simple: his policies don’t work, so he blames his opponents for blocking him from adopting more of them.
YOU WANT TO REDUCE THE NATIONAL DEBT? THAT’S RACIST!
“Lazy, obstructionist Republicans” is just one meme in the White House’s extensive arsenal of insults hurled at Obama’s political opponents. Republicans are also heartless and cruel, homophobic, sexist, proudly ignorant, and inherently violent. But more than anything else, according to the administration and its allies, Republicans are irredeemably, rabidly racist. Of course, Democrats have been reflexively accusing Republican public figures of racism for decades; what’s new under the Obama administration is that with the birth of the tea party, those accusations are now routinely flung at ordinary Americans who primarily criticize the president’s spending policies.
Failing to find any racism to support their accusations, Democrats seem willing to manufacture racist incidents. The most famous of these may have been Congressman John Lewis’ allegation in March 2010 that tea party protesters yelled racial slurs at black congressmen entering the Capitol building. Unfortunately for Lewis, copious film footage taken at the scene and uploaded onto the internet utterly failed to reveal a single slur.
54

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