The White House made the first formal move last week in the ongoing fiscal talks, presenting congressional Republicans with a substantive, detailed plan. GOP leaders, not surprisingly, hated it — President Obama’s proposal met the goals Republicans laid out, but did so in a way they found offensive.
What striking, though, is the extent to which the congressional GOP leadership seems absolutely stunned by the White House’s opening bid.
[House Speaker John Boehner] said the reason negotiations are going so poorly is that Obama administration officials — in particular, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner — aren’t taking Republicans seriously. Boehner said he was shocked at Geithner’s proposal to Republicans last week.
“I was flabbergasted. I looked at him and I said, ‘You can’t be serious.’ I’ve just never seen anything like it,” Boehner said.
If Boehner has “never seen anything like” Obama’s debt-reduction plan, the House Speaker probably needs to do more to keep up with current events. There’s nothing in Obama’s plan that (a) wasn’t already included in the president’s previous budgets; (b) wasn’t part of his 2012 re-election platform; or (c) both. The president’s opening gambit was bold, but there wasn’t anything that new in the proposal.
So why in the world are Republicans looking for the fainting couch? Why did Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) reportedly “burst into laughter” after hearing the White House offer? Because GOP congressional leaders thought they’d established certain unwritten rules for how this game is supposed to be played — and Obama is choosing to ignore them, leaving Republicans flummoxed and stunned.
The New York Times reports today that the president is “scarred by failed negotiations in his first term and emboldened by a clear if close election to a second, has emerged as a different kind of negotiator.” Throughout his first term, Obama “repeatedly offered what he considered compromises on stimulus spending, health care and deficit reduction to Republicans, who either rejected them as inadequate or pocketed them and insisted on more.”
So, this time, the president presented a plan that met his own standards, and challenged GOP leaders to do the same. Apparently, Republicans didn’t see this coming, leaving them, in Boehner’s word, flabbergasted.









