Reince Priebus is a genius
by digby
I’m beginning to develop a real respect for Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus. Every day he says something aggressively absurd but which always features very strong emotional logic with his rank and file. Yesterday there was this bizarroworld discussion. Today, you have this:
A legion of limousine liberals will descend tonight on San Francisco’s famed Billionaire’s Row. Leading the pack, the most famous limo of them all — and inside it, the chief liberal, President Barack Obama.
Though now free of the demands of campaign fund-raising, the president has discovered he really, really misses it. So he’s back on the big-money circuit, this time for his friends at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
And where better for the self-ordained defender of the middle class to champion his cause than the home of oil heir Gordon Getty, in the heart of Billionaire’s Row, the bay-view boulevard where those with ten-figure net-worths snatch up homes with eight-figure price tags.
But what else does the president have to do?
Well, his budget is two months late to Congress. No matter, the national debt is only $16.7 trillion. Then there’s the floundering economy. But surely the middle class can put the bills on hold while the president sips a top-shelf cocktail.
In his February State of the Union Address, the president delivered a robust defense of the middle class. “It is our generation’s task, then, to re-ignite the true engine of America’s economic growth: a rising, thriving middle class.” Great! The middle class needs help after the first four years of his presidency. Yet watching the president’s actions, his words ring hollow.
For good measure, the president used the speech to fire a rhetorical shot at billionaires — as he often does. Few Americans haven’t heard him malign “millionaires and billionaires” for any number of reasons. But nothing says “I really mean it” like rubbing elbows with them in the Bay Area.
This is Obama’s method of operation: publicly brow-beating then privately back-slapping. And while he collects checks from those he pretends to disdain, taxpayers get to foot the bill. A jaunt to California may cost a couple hundred dollars on JetBlue. But on Air Force One, it costs $180,000. An hour.
Last month, the Obama administration announced it was axing White House tours. Why? They blamed the sequester budget cuts that went into effect March 1. So there’s no money for third-graders to visit the people’s house, but there’s plenty of money for the president to schmooze at a billionaire’s house?
As Vice President Biden likes to say, “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”
To be fair, the president doesn’t yet have an official budget to show. But, by now, we’ve seen enough to know what — or whom — he really values.
What an amazing collection of contradictory and hypocritical assertions. I’m frankly impressed. Here we have the Chairman of the Party which ran the scion of one of America’s most well known and wealthy political families in the last presidential race — a man who was at least partially undone by a video which showed him lugubriously explaining to bunch of millionaires that half the country is a bunch of moochers. A statement, by the way, which the entire GOP elite loudly applauded. Today, Preibus is claiming that his party is the protector of the middle class and the enemy of the wealthy (well the “bad” wealthy, the limousine liberals, not the “good” ones like the Koch Brothers. They’re Real Makers, dontcha know.)
Then he condemns the president for spending money to fly around the country while the White House tours have been closed, even though the reason for the closing, the sequester, is largely the result of the GOP’s decades-long spending jihad. Indeed, the Paul Ryan budget would slash spending even more. (And yes, the president is also guilty of deficit hawkery, but it’s really rich for the party of small government to now decry spending cuts. It must be nice not having to worry about cognitive dissonance.) Oh, and by the way, political travel costs are reimbursed to the taxpayers which Preibus as a top level political hack surely knows.
Finally, “sipping cocktails” harkens back to some of their earliest broadsides against him back in 2008. You remember, the image of the “presumptuous” Obama. He’s basically a lazy goodfernothing avoiding his responsibilities in Washington so he can rub elbows with the wealthy (and laugh, I tell you, laugh at all you losers!)
Anyway, this whole thing makes little intellectual sense, but it does have an emotional resonance for the GOP base. It’s simple. In these populist times, the GOP leadership is projecting its own image as the party of the rich onto the Democrats and then taking the role of protector of the middle class. You can understand why they would feel the need to do this after Romney made total asses of them in the last election and they subsequently spent months ostentatiously fighting to protect the wealthy from even paying a cent more in taxes. But it takes real talent to be so boldly hypocritical a without betraying even a modicum of sheepishness.
But then that’s always been one of the right’s very special talents. And they have found a very talented leader in Preibus (or whomever is writing his blog everyday.) He’s got his work cut out for him.
.