Focus the Debate Upon Jobs

by Steve

At least the GOP is being transparent about what it plans to do. From the news over the weekend, incoming House and Senate Republicans are fixating on two things: undoing the New Deal and rolling all spending back to 2008 levels. Notice that the word "jobs" doesn't cross their lips. Add to that Darryl Issa's pledge to find billions in corruption foisted upon us by the Obama initiatives, and the GOP is basically saying that it'll be war - all the time, seven days a week. Presumably, the Obama White House has a communications plan for dealing with this onslaught, something they seriously lacked the last two years while telling themselves that they were the change the country needed without understanding they were being opposed by people committed to political destruction and not the country's well-being.

Even though the GOP will be focusing on cutting spending and using the debt ceiling vote to undo Social Security, something Obama should have seen coming while he was patting himself on the back for his tax compromise in December, they will sell this as something the American people voted for. It isn't true of course. Democrats need to immediately respond that the GOP far right base voted for extremism and the small percentage of the electorate that voted in the 2010 midterms doesn't constitute "the American people".

Democrats need to ram the message through that what the American people wanted were jobs and a recovering economy above all else, and not the typical GOP default positions that have been proven wrong over the last two decades. Simply force the GOP to tell the American public how cutting spending back to 2008 levels and undoing Social Security were 1) what the American people wanted, 2) will create millions of jobs, and 3) will help the 99 percent of the country below the wealthy elite. The GOP cannot come up with these arguments, so the sooner Democrats and the White House can force the debate around these three questions and away from the far right rhetoric, the quicker the whole GOP agenda will be shown for what it is: a simple effort to take advantage of widespread misery to once again benefit the top one percent.

Hopefully the Obama White House gets it.