GOP blame game self-destructs [View all]

[DonViejo]

Party's attempt to pin looming, across-the-board cuts on Obama makes striking a deal virtually impossible

BY JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

The big GOP talking point about sequestration, the looming across-the-board budget cuts, was a simple one: It was all Barack Obama’s idea in the first place, and therefore his fault. There’s been a lot of discussion of how honest this idea was (not particularly), and how effective it’s likely to be if sequestration actually happens (not especially), and even why they likely settled on it (because if there’s one thing that everyone in the Republican Party can agree on it would be bashing Barack Obama). But what I don’t think anyone has pointed out is what’s really wrong with this talking point: It actively undermines any current negotiations. Again.

That’s because Republicans are doing everything possible to remind Barack Obama, and other Democrats, that Republicans are at least as interested in using negotiations as an opportunity to generate material for future ad campaigns as they are in striking deals.

Go back, for a minute, to the negotiations that produced the Budget Control Act and produced the sequester that is now scheduled to go into effect in a few days. Recall that Republicans were demanding huge spending cuts, and refusing to raise the debt limit unless they got them. The White House was willing to agree on the size of deficit cuts, and both sides were willing to agree to put off the debate for a while on how exactly to do deficit reduction. The problem was that Republicans wanted some assurances that when negotiations started up again the default would be cuts, not status quo; the White House suggested automatic cuts by a certain date unless the deficit cuts were deep enough.

Claiming now that this constitutes “Obama’s sequester” isn’t just a stretch. The debate over whether Obama was “really” the author of it isn’t very interesting.

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http://www.salon.com/2013/02/23/gops_blame_game_spells_doom/