Suitably Flip

How the GOP (Nearly) Stole Christmas

If not for Barry Lou Who, those evil tax-hikers might've gotten away with it.

Your must-read of the morning is today's WSJ editorial.

Here's a taste, but click over and read the whole frustrating thing:

GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.

Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

The Obama White House likes to bemoan the fact that their only material weakness is that of messaging (odd for an administration that sold itself to the American people on its sole, ostensibly sufficient talent of oratory aptitude), that if the slow-witted populace - impervious to endless primetime addresses - could only wrap their minds around the genius of the wildly unpopular policies being foist upon them, surely we'd all come to recognize the current President ranks among the top 4 of all time.

If this episode (i.e. a significant political battle being won handily by the White House, despite the lack of any meaninigful underlying policy substance and requiring that the President play diameterically against type) is any indication, I'd say they've got their silky-smooth-messaging-obscuring-utter-lack-of-solutions groove back.

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How the GOP (Nearly) Stole Christmas

If not for Barry Lou Who, those evil tax-hikers might've gotten away with it.

Your must-read of the morning is today's WSJ editorial.

Here's a taste, but click over and read the whole frustrating thing:

GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.

Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

The Obama White House likes to bemoan the fact that their only material weakness is that of messaging (odd for an administration that sold itself to the American people on its sole, ostensibly sufficient talent of oratory aptitude), that if the slow-witted populace - impervious to endless primetime addresses - could only wrap their minds around the genius of the wildly unpopular policies being foist upon them, surely we'd all come to recognize the current President ranks among the top 4 of all time.

If this episode (i.e. a significant political battle being won handily by the White House, despite the lack of any meaninigful underlying policy substance and requiring that the President play diameterically against type) is any indication, I'd say they've got their silky-smooth-messaging-obscuring-utter-lack-of-solutions groove back.