For all of you "frustrated" Democrats out there, a senior White House official (who apparently didn't have the guts to use his/her name) wants you to know that:
"We wanted a fight, the House didn't throw a punch," a senior White House official tells ABC News, pointing out that for months before the 2010 midterm elections, President Obama was making the case against the Bush tax cuts for wealthier Americans. "The House wouldn't vote before the Senate, and the Senate was afraid they'd lose a vote on it."
"It was like the Jets versus Sharks except there weren't any Jets," the official said. "Senator Schumer says he wants a fight? He couldn't hold his caucus together."
And all that's true. Who can forget watching House and Senate Democrats screw up the no-brainer issue of voting for a middle class tax cut, turning it into a fiasco of fighting over who would go first before dropping the issue altogether, with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) saying:
We don’t need to have a vote to let the American public know where we stand.
And so Democrats once again kept their powder dry for the fight that they will apparently never wage.
So this anonymous official is right -- House and Senate Democrats dropped the ball and are now blaming the President because he was forced to compromise. If only Mr. No-name had stopped there:
"This isn't a debate in a lab somewhere," the official continued. "People's taxes were going to go up, and then we were going to have a Senate with a slimmer margin and House under Republican control."
Uh huh. It's all about the people. Except for the part where it wasn't:
Although his liberal supporters are furious about the decision, President Obama's willingness to extend all of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts is part of what White House officials say is a deliberate strategy: to demonstrate his ability to compromise with Republicans and portray the president as the last reasonable man in a sharply partisan Washington.
The move is based on a political calculation, drawn from his party's midterm defeat, that places a premium on winning back independent voters.
These White House officials who are peddling talking points to the media really need get on the same page.
