Saving President Obama
by digby
In urging lawmakers to vote for his tax deal, President Obama is using one of his go-to lines from the healthcare debate, according to a Democratic lawmaker.
Obama is telling members of Congress that failure to pass the tax-cut legislation could result in the end of his presidency, Rep. Peter DeFazio (Ore.) said.
“The White House is putting on tremendous pressure, making phone calls, the president is making phone calls saying this is the end of his presidency if he doesn’t get this bad deal,” he told CNN’s Eliot Spitzer. But the White House shot back late on Wednesday, as a senior administration official said that the president hadn’t actually called or spoken to DeFazio.
Obama’s push shows that the president is going to the mat in order to push through Congress the compromise brokered with Republicans.
During the end of the healthcare debate, Obama reportedly told Democrats upset that the bill did not contain a public healthcare option that not passing it could put his presidency on the line and stall the liberal agenda for decades.
You’ll recall this comment from the president when Democrats tried to tell him that things weren’t looking good in their districts:
“They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’
How’d that work out?Maybe all presidents do this, I don’t know. I suppose when all is said and done, in their minds it really is all about them. But I would think they’d lose credibility if they use the appeal as an all-purpose pitch. It’s one thing to argue that you need to pass the health care bill or the liberal agenda will be stalled for decades. (That was a common argument at the time.) But it’s quite another to argue that your presidency is on the line every time you want a some half-baked pile of junk passed, particularly when it’s a Republican tax cut and time bomb bill with a small concession to keep the unemployed out of the gutters at Christmas time. If you can’t pass that with wingnuts and Blue Dogs then something has gone terribly wrong.Whatever. It will pass. The Democrats made sure of that when they decided not to act on the tax cuts when they had the clout and momentum to do it. Now it’s pretty much kabuki.
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