The similarity of Barack Obama and Karl Rove
On Second Thoughts
By THOMAS B. EDSALL, NYT
President Obama is pushing hard to persuade Congress to back off from the brutal spending cuts - $1.2 trillion - mandated by the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act, which he signed into law on Aug. 2, 2011.
In a simultaneous but unrelated development, Karl Rove is pressing top Republican donors to back his Conservative Victory Project, an organization designed to snuff out the candidacies of right-wing extremists in Republican primaries who, in 2010 and 2012, prevented the party from winning a Senate majority.
These otherwise different situations have at least one thing in common: Obama and Rove are trying to claw their way out of holes they dug for themselves. Obama's fingerprints are all over the sequestration he is now determined to avoid, and Rove played a central role in the creation of the ideologically rigid Republican Party he would like to guide back toward the center.
The most serious issue is the sequester, about which we have heard a lot lately. As part of the 2011 debt ceiling-budget agreement, the administration and Congress included a provision calling for $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts over nine years, amounting to $85 billion this year. The cuts would be split, half in domestic programs, half in military programs, if no agreement on deficit reduction is reached.
(More here.)
By THOMAS B. EDSALL, NYT
President Obama is pushing hard to persuade Congress to back off from the brutal spending cuts - $1.2 trillion - mandated by the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act, which he signed into law on Aug. 2, 2011.
In a simultaneous but unrelated development, Karl Rove is pressing top Republican donors to back his Conservative Victory Project, an organization designed to snuff out the candidacies of right-wing extremists in Republican primaries who, in 2010 and 2012, prevented the party from winning a Senate majority.
These otherwise different situations have at least one thing in common: Obama and Rove are trying to claw their way out of holes they dug for themselves. Obama's fingerprints are all over the sequestration he is now determined to avoid, and Rove played a central role in the creation of the ideologically rigid Republican Party he would like to guide back toward the center.
The most serious issue is the sequester, about which we have heard a lot lately. As part of the 2011 debt ceiling-budget agreement, the administration and Congress included a provision calling for $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts over nine years, amounting to $85 billion this year. The cuts would be split, half in domestic programs, half in military programs, if no agreement on deficit reduction is reached.
(More here.)
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