A nearly middle-aged woman wanders through a poorly lit first floor of a house, speaking in mournful terms. She voted for Barack Obama because he spoke so well, she confesses. With no evidence, she claims his stimulus made things much worse. Then she raises a rhetorical question, saying there "has to be a way to take away President Obama's blank check."
The implication is that Obama can spend whatever he wants. He hass a blank check. She is also claiming that Obama has absolute control of government.
The deeply depressed woman does not explain how to take away the blank check, but the timing of the commercial suggests that the answer is to not raise the debt ceiling.
Its very effective television. Of course, even an alert seventh grader would know the president has no blank check. But most voters do not seem to know that. Maybe like the deeply distressed woman, they live in homes without lights, so they do not read and get their news from Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Rupert Murdoch's FOX News.
By CBO standares, Obama policies saved or created 2,500,000 jobs. His policies headed off a terrible derpession and pulled the nation back from the brink of a collapsed banking system.
But these are only facts.
There are at least four lies in the clever political message.
1) All the spending is Obama's doing. None of it is to cover the two wars he inherited or to pay interest on the borrowing necessary to cover the Bush tax cuts.
2) Obama now has unlimited power in Washington--a "blank check." The fact is that since January, the Republican House has blocked any effort at job creration. In the Senate, Republicans continue to exercise a veto on job creation.
3) Before January, Obama only had a few months when the GOP had difficulty blocking job creation. With a unanimously opposed Republican vote in the House and nearly solid opposition in the Senate, he wasx only able to pass an inadequate stimulus and banking reform that did not go far enough.
4) the biggest lie is the implication that by blocking a debt ceiling extension, the country would be better off.
The people who financed this advertisement clearly think the Republican party will benefit from the financial chaos that will follow financial default.
Until a few days ago, this seemed to be the case. At one time well over 70% of Americans wanted no debt ceiling extension. Now the number has fallen to 42%, most of them being people who can only think in slogans and absolutely refuse to listen to reasoned argument.
Maybe Mitch McConnell is privy to polls the rest of us do not see. He came up with a plan that would saddle Obama with the burden of solving the debt crisis, but it would avert default. McConnell offered this "compromise" because he thought it possible that the people would blame the Republicans for the consequences of default.
Given the ability of the Repugs to persuade the masses of just about anything, this may not be true.This is why the Democrats have done so little to combat the Republican economic message that cutting spending somehow creates jobs. Progressives still cannot understand why the people voted to go back to the policies that nearly plunged the nation into a deep depession and nearly destroyed financial system.
The Senate minority leader thought that by not compromising, the Republicans would take co-ownership of the economy. This assumes a large independent element capable of taking in information and reaching logical conclusions. It is possible that the Kentuckian does not realize the full extent of the Republican triumph deploying cognitive science and in message control, cowing the mainstream media, and setting the national agenda. It is impossible to believe that he is willing to compromise out of any hligh motives. He is no Henry Clay, and his party could not tolerate one.
The fact is that the economy is in trouble due to Republican policies, and fuller recovery is impossible because their policies block it. Several of the many Republican extremists in the House now speak against adding any stimulus to a debt ceiling package. That pretty well gives away the game. By blocking extension of the debt ceiling, they are risking a financial crisis that could rock the world. Yet they war willing to do so to derive political advantage.
This present crisis is about the 2012 election--pure and simple. The Republicans have seen to it that there is not enough stimulus to bring fuller recovery. Now they are weakening financial reform, placing the nation in danger of another financial crisis. If the republicans thought there would be no political blow-back they would create a default crisis in order to sink President Obama in 2012.