Krauthammer - always interesting, sometimes scary.Now, with his stunning tax deal, Obama is back. Holding no high cards, he nonetheless managed to resurface suddenly not just as a player but as orchestrator, dealmaker and central actor in a high $1 trillion drama.
That's way too generous. What was he going to do, allow a tax increase on top of Obamacare and the Stimulus bill? I don't see why I'd give Bambi credit for doing something he was boxed into doing.
That bipartisan margin will go a long way toward erasing the partisan stigma of Obama's first two years, marked by Stimulus I, which passed without a single House Republican, and a health-care bill that garnered no congressional Republicans at all.
Amazing! He can pass a bill with the Trunks, just leaving the libtards behind!
He could have done that two years ago.
Despite this, some on the right are gloating that Obama had been maneuvered into forfeiting his liberal base. Nonsense. He will never lose his base. Where do they go?
Well. At least the have principles.
No they don't. And they do have somewhere to go: they can sit on their hands, the way conservatives and libertarians sat on their hands in 2006 and 2008.
And Obama pulled this off at his lowest political ebb. After the shambles of the election and with no bargaining power - the Republicans could have gotten everything they wanted on the Bush tax cuts retroactively in January without fear of an Obama veto - he walks away with what even Paul Ryan admits was $313 billion in superfluous spending. Including a $6 billion subsidy for ethanol. Why, just a few weeks ago Al Gore, the Earth King, finally confessed that ethanol subsidies were a mistake.
Read the whole thing.