What Are Obama’s Secret Post-Election Plans?
Two articles in today’s Wall Street Journal illustrate how President Obama is putting politics before policy – deliberately failing to lead on tough fiscal choices to score cheap political points. One news article notes that the White House has put together a secret deficit reduction plan, which it refuses to release to the American people:
President Barack Obama’s most recent budget…[did not] detail how to slow the growth of spending on Medicare or Social Security. Nor has Mr. Obama made public the details of proposals he made in unsuccessful talks with House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) last summer, such as raising the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 67, a notion both Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have endorsed.
Administration officials are preparing new deficit-reduction proposals to be released if Mr. Obama is re-elected, but see no political advantage in previewing them now, people familiar with the process said.
Likewise, an excellent editorial in this morning’s Journal about the Administration’s plans for top-down government health “reform” notes that the White House has refused to name individuals to Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board “until after the election.”
So we’ve gone from a world in which candidate Obama repeatedly promised that he would hold all the negotiations on C-SPAN to one in which tough choices are deliberately being withheld from the American people for political reasons, and a world in which the President’s pledge that “we are implementing” Obamacare right now doesn’t apply to the supposed centerpiece of its attempt to control costs – because of the backlash that exposing the law’s coercive nature would generate. Hope and change indeed.