As the Republican presidential candidates duked it out on Meet The Press Sunday morning, our dear friend -- DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz -- stepped onto the Fox News Sunday set, opposite RNC chief Reince Priebus. As we were reminded very recently, DWS typically prefers to cut and run from uncomfortable questions. Luckily for FNS viewer, scurrying off a television set during live programming wasn't really an option for her. Host Chris Wallace shelled her with tough, fair questions in an attempt to drag her off of her carefully rehearsed talking points. First up, a series of challenges about President Obama's now-famous prediction that if he didn't turn the economy around during his first three years in office, he'd be facing a "one term proposition:"
DWS' retort was a mix of reiterating previous magical statements and offering other ahistorical excuses. First off, if Obama inherited a record deficit, what has he done to ameliorate the situation? Nada, blatantly violating his big pledge to cut the US' annual deficit in half by the end of this year. Instead, he's accrued new debt at an astonishing clip, and introduced a budget that would have added nearly $10 Trillion in additional debt over the next decade if it hadn't been unanimously rejected by the Senate. Secondly, the economic crisis was triggered by the wildly inflated housing bubble bursting. This problem was not caused by laissez faire recklessness from Republicans. Just the opposite. The GOP was pushing for more regulation of housing giants Fannie and Freddie to help curb irresponsible, government-mandated subprime lending practices. Democrats fought these efforts tooth and nail, trotting out the race card to aid their bullying. Finally, the Dodd-Frank "Wall Street Reform" bill, authored by two of the men most responsible for the mess, institutionalized "too big to fail" and created a alarmingly unaccountable "consumer protection bureau." (The leader of this body received one of President Obama's special non-recess "recess" appointments last week). Aside from all that, DWS was spot on.
The better clip was Wallace's merciless grilling of the Florida Congresswoman on Solyndra. After she claimed that Mitt Romney was a "jobs killer" at Bain Capital (where he created tens of thousands of net jobs), Wallace asked if Wasserman Schultz views the president as a jobs killer for his role in the Solyndra bankruptcy scandal -- which resulted in 1,000 of the 1.7 million American jobs lost since Obama took office. Predictably, DWS rejected the comparison. Why? I'll let her try to explain:
It's weak sauce, but it's the best she's got. Bain's track record was mixed, sure, but it was positive on the whole. And, crucially, it invested private dollars in the private sector. Romney oversaw a largely successful company and had to answer to its board and shareholders. Obama "invested" hundreds of billions of (borrowed) taxpayer dollars on a "stimulus" bill that has failed to achieve the metrics for success on which he sold it. The Solyndra example is just one particularly outrageous failure, due to its inherent corruption, intentional dishonesty, appalling irresponsibility, and rank politicization. Re-read some of the posts I linked in that last sentence. The White House was intimately involved in every minute detail of the Solyndra loan, failure, illegal re-financing, and cover-up. DWS and Democrats want to Americans to be outrageously outraged that a fraction of the companies Mitt Romney's firm invested in were forced to shed jobs, but they don't believe America's CEO should be held to account for his failed venture socialism and atrocious mismanagement of the nation's balance sheet. Good luck with that.
One final point: "Why bother wasting so much time on Debbie Wasserman Schultz?" you may be asking yourself. It's a reasonable question. The answer is that DWS is the Democrats' hack in chief. Her sole job is to attack Republicans and spout partisan talking points. Rest assured that most Democrats will parrot some variation of whatever nonsense she's peddling in any given news cycle. Given her apparent -- shall we say -- limitations, DWS does us all the courtesy of boiling her recitations of these points down to their lowest-common-denominator simplest. It's actually quite instructive.
