One line from Obama’s speech felt like the first real echo of the 2012 presidential race, as he happily hung GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan around the necks of his challengers: “One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates.”
As far as I can tell all of the Republican presidential candidates have given a big thumbs up to the Ryan budget plan. Two contenders, Pawlenty and Daniels, haven’t done more than say kind things in general. But most have said they’re down with it. And Mitt Romney in particular has signed on for the whole thing — which means he’ll go into the 2012 primary and possibly the general election as supporting the abolition of Medicare. And that’s a tough thing to carry, as it should be. Read More
I noticed there must be a problem this morning when I saw Speaker Boehner take to Twitter to defend his budget deal with President Obama after an article in the Post showed the actual cuts are quite, quite small. It was sort of sad: No, no, no, three Obama czars dethroned! Four death panels repurposed as bummer panels! Brian Beutler gives us the story on Boehner’s attempt to pick up the pieces.
Rep. Cummings (D-MD) tears into Gov. Walker (R-WI) at congressional hearing.
Here’s an interesting take on the 2012 head to head numbers from Tom Jensen at PPP. This is looking at a new poll of theirs which just came out. Obama continues to lead all the big GOP contenders — Huckabee, Romney, etc. On their face, Obama’s spreads are pretty good. The closest anyone gets is Huckabee, at 5 points behind Obama.
By historical standards that’s not bad at all — certainly in a climate where unemployment remains at historically high levels.
But Jensen notes this point: in each match up, the vast majority of the undecideds disapprove of Obama’s performance. And it’s very reasonable to assume that those will break strongly against the president. As he notes, a decent part of Obama’s strength right now is the abysmal GOP field, where few if any of the candidates seem to pass the plausibility test for a national campaign. And the ones who do, like Romney, have what could well prove debilitating liabilities.
Minority Leader Pelosi suggests that Democrats will jump into the breach in the House vote on the budget deal if Speaker Boehner can’t pass it with Republican votes.
Jon Stewart gives us a background look at what Donald Trump’s birther investigators are doing out in Hawaii. Watch it.
Speaker Boehner sidesteps questions about whether he has enough Republican votes to pass the Budget Deal.