OPINION:
President Obama has stooped to name-calling, distortion and mockery in a desperate attempt to rally support for his unpopular economic policies.
For the second day in a row on his taxpayer-funded re-election bus tour, Mr. Obama ridiculed the Senate Republican proposal unveiled last week. “Here’s what the plan boils down to,” he said in Jamestown, N.C. on Tuesday. “We’re going to gut environmental regulations. We’re going to drill more. We’re going to roll back Wall Street reform. And we’re going to repeal health care reform. Now, that’s a plan, but it’s not a jobs plan.”
One of the plan’s sponsors, Sen. John McCain, was outraged by the president’s sneering tone. “I think that’s very unfortunate to mock serious proposals,” the Arizona Republican told The Washington Times on Tuesday. “I think it indicates he is in full campaign mode. Going down there on the taxpayer dime, calling it not a campaign event, and then attacking Republicans is probably the worst overreach that I’ve observed in the years I’ve been in the Congress.”
Democrats control the Senate where Mr. Obama’s so-called jobs bill was defeated last week, but he’s misrepresenting Democratic failure to childishly call Republicans stupid. His laugh line on the trail has been, “It may be that just the bill was too big the first time, there was just too much stuff, and they weren’t clear about what the jobs act would do. It was confusing to them.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was uncharacteristically animated when asked by The Washington Times about Mr. Obama’s new stump speeches.
“I think complaints about Congress fall on deaf ears,” the Kentucky Republican said. “He owned the Congress for the first two years. They did everything they wanted. They borrowed. They spent. They overregulated. And all those policies are in place. And you can see how much it has done for the economy — 1.5 million jobs lost since the first stimulus. And he’s coming back and asking us to do it again. At home we say, ’There’s no education in the second kick of the mule.’ We’ve already done it. We tried it. It failed.”
Mr. McConnell is also a sponsor of the GOP jobs bill that the campaigner in chief uses for a lame joke. The president said that, “The Republicans did put out their own jobs bill. They called it the ’Real American Jobs Act.’” He waited for the laughter to die down before adding, “So they don’t get points for originality.”
The bully pulpit apparently doesn’t come with a fact checker. The name of the legislation is the Jobs Through Growth Act. Mr. McConnell said that, “He’s trying to convince the American people that it’s anybody’s fault but his — that we’re where we are. It must be the fault of those Republicans in Congress. it must be the fault of those rich people. It must be the fault of those people on Wall Street. I don’t think the American people are going to fall for it.”
Unlike Mr. Obama’s new $467 billion stimulus proposal that would be paid for with tax hikes, the Republican plan doesn’t cost a dime to implement. The bill is a compilation of the best existing legislation designed to spur economic growth. It would simplify the tax code and lower both the top income-tax and corporate-tax rates to 25 percent.
The legislation would stop federal agencies from creating any new regulations until the unemployment rate falls below 7.7 percent. It blocks the National Relations Labor Board from stopping new plants from being built. It would undo Interior Department regulations that block energy production and curtail enforcement of excessive Environmental Protection Agency dictates.
Obamacare would be repealed and replaced, as would the Dodd-Frank regulatory nightmare. It requires a balanced-budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The GOP plan is a serious public-policy proposal that offers a way out of the Keynesian malaise created by Mr. Obama’s public spending spree. Democrats are sure to block this pro-growth legislation through their control of the Senate and White House. However, it’s a great plan to show the American people that there is an alternative to the liberal policies being pushed by the president and his cohorts on Capitol Hill.
Emily Miller is a senior editor for the Opinion pages at The Washington Times.
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