White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel appeared on CNN’s State of the Union this morning, and tried to lay at least a couple of the country’s current problems at the feet of the Bush administration.
On the record $1.4 trillion federal budget deficit, Emanuel chastised Republicans for abandoning the pay-as-you-go “discipline of the 90s” while passing three tax cuts and a massive prescription drug bill. “That led to $5 trillion of red ink run up — the biggest red ink run up in the shortest period of time in American history,” Emanuel said. “Literally over half the nation’s debt has accumulated in the last eight years.”
Emanuel also seemed to criticize the Bush administration for its handling of the war in Afghanistan, saying that many of the questions of strategy and policy that President Obama is now asking are being asked for the first time.
“Before it never even got on the radar screen for them,” Emanuel said. “Everything was always about Iraq.”
For years the U.S. was “adrift” in Afghanistan and now, Emanuel said, “we’re beginning at scratch” — even after eight years of war.
Emanuel also emphasized that the president’s decision about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is not nearly as simple as send 40,000 more troops, or don’t. Whether the U.S. has a “credible Afghan partner” is also a crucial factor, Emanuel said, and “the president will not be rushed to making a decision.”
The White House chief of staff also had some tough words for the “titans of the financial industry,” criticizing them for fighting Democratic efforts to reform the financial regulatory regime — even after taxpayers bailed out Wall Street firms whose actions helped cause the financial crisis.
“They’re literally going and fighting the very type of regulations and reforms that are necessary to prevent again a crisis like this happening,” Emanuel said, adding a moment later that “they assume everybody else has basically short-term memory problems around here.”
“They have responsibility to be part of the solution, not to be part of the obstacles.”
And the White House’s conflict with Fox News? “It’s not so much a conflict,” Emanuel said. Fox News is simply “not a news organization, so much as it has a perspective.”
But Emanuel tried to downplay the issue. “The concentration of the White House isn’t about what Fox is doing.”
