President Obama thought he would open his 2012 re-election campaign with a bit of big-footing that would show the GOP presidential candidates gathered at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley next week who was going to set the agenda and call the tune.
Despite White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's bald face lie about the timing of the president's proposed speech to a Joint Session of the Congress being a coincidence, no one The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza was my guest on the radio show Tuesday and summarized the situation crisply:
"At this level of politics, right, we’re talking about the highest level. I’m talking about the presidency, as well as the race to nominate someone against him. There are not coincidences like this. This debate has been on the books for quite some time. When Mitt Romney announced that he was going to say something about the economy on September 6th, there was plenty of writing about the fact that now September 6th and September 7th were taken, because of the debate. They knew what they were doing here. I think they knew that they believe that they wanted to force people to make a decision both in terms of what they were watching, as well as try to draw a contrast. You know, I think the White House viewed it, and probably still continues to view it, as a beneficial contest for them, the President talking about jobs and the economy in a very formal setting, while Republicans are debating in a much more free-wheeling setting where we assume that there’ll be some, you know, certainly some attacks on President Obama, but they’ll probably attack one another a little bit, too, that they like that contrast. So no, I don’t buy that this was just a happy coincidence. And I’d say this if it was a Republican in the White House and Democrats debating. There aren’t coincidences like this as this moment.
Cillizza was right of course, and the president's team must have chuckled about how smart they were to monkeywrench the GOP this way.
How utterly Alinksyite. How Chicago.
Except House Speaker John Boehner wasn't going to allow his co-equal Legislative branch of government to be manipulated by the Executive just because the Executive needed a cheap political stunt.
This president has never quite got the idea of three, co-equal branches of government. He governs by diktat when he couldn't get even his supermajorities to act during the two years he had them.
And he refuses to defend laws he disagrees with in the courts even though they were duly enacted by a past Congress and signed by a past president.