Jonah Goldberg joins other conservative pundits in making light of President Obama’s warning to congressional Republicans not to call his bluff. In a new column at National Review Online, Goldberg says, “that’s like a con man saying, ‘Don’t give any weight to the fact that I’m lying.’”
But Goldberg says GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell should avoid trying to join in on the joke. Goldberg cites McConnell’s discussion of the political calculation behind his debt-limit plan:
[W]hat’s particularly frustrating is how McConnell is selling his proposal. In an interview with radio host Laura Ingraham, McConnell explained his thinking: “If we go into default, [Obama] will say that Republicans are making the economy worse. . . . The president will have the bully pulpit to blame the Republicans for all of this destruction,” setting himself up for re-election.
“I refuse to help Barack Obama get reelected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy,” McConnell added. “That’s a very bad positioning going into an election.”
McConnell is right. But McConnell isn’t a pundit. Why the hell is he reading his stage direction out loud? Last fall, he said that the “single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Most conservatives agree with him, because without a Republican president, you can’t repeal Obamacare or do the other things conservatives believe are necessary to set the country back on the right track. Democrats see things the same way, but from a liberal perspective.
But Democrats, for all their internecine squabbles, have the discipline to take the high road rhetorically.
Republicans have a habit of seeming like actors who first want to know their “motivation” and then read it instead of their lines.
