Positioning The Duck
by digby
Huffington Post wonders why the GOP voted against the public will in the lame duck session”
Republicans say they will follow “the people’s priorities” when they gain power on Capitol Hill next month. Yet when it came to tax cuts for the wealthy and other top issues that dominated the just concluded lame-duck Congress, the GOP either defied what most Americans want or followed their will only after grudging, drawn-out battles.
Relentlessly focused on the next election, politicians are usually loath to act against voter sentiment. Still, the post-election weeks of the 111th Congress saw battles in which Washington seemed oblivious to the direction most people wanted lawmakers to take, as measured by public opinion polls. These included:
_Congress’ approval of a compromise between President Barack Obama and congressional GOP leaders renewing expiring tax cuts for everyone, despite broad public opposition to including people earning over $250,000. An Associated Press-CNBC Poll in late November found only 34 percent wanted taxes reduced for the richest Americans.
It goes on to also discuss DADT, DREAM and START as more examples of issues the GOP was on the wrong side of.
I think it works like this: the success of the lame duck session is being widely attributed to the President and the Village is pushing that meme very hard. From the GOP perspective this works in their favor. They get to blame all the individual items the public doesn’t like on the Muslim communist usurper which is, at this point, all they care about. (Hence, “they ate our lunch.”) It’s very useful to have a Democratic president get credit for unpopular GOP proposals that aren’t going to work, like the tax cuts.
Of course, the president gets to take credit for the popular proposals as well, but these were all issues that either the public doesn’t care much about like START or are like the repeal of DADT, which despite its 77% public approval, Republicans are leery of supporting en masse because of the strong objections from part of their base. The one thing they defeated was a popular immigration bill that was very important to their base to defeat.
I think they’re happy to have a Democrat sign on Bush’s signature issue and especially happy to have the administration use their rationale for doing it. If the economy doesn’t improve, the Democrats will own the failure and can’t use it against them. If it does, it will be attributed to Republican voodoo economics working to create Morning in America. I think they now feel they have a good argument going into 2012 regardless of how it goes. They are good at using the levers of opposition to advance their own goals.
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