At the start of this shutdown-struck week, I published a piece asking whether Barack Obama should “reveal his inner pissed-off president.” The point was to wonder if it were time for the president, who usually keeps his cool, to call out the tea party Republican hostage-takers as crazies hell-bent on imposing suffering on millions of Americans—by shuttering the federal government and/or forcing a US government default—due to their obsessive opposition to Obamcare. It’s unclear whether there’s anything the president could say that would change the perverse internal dynamic within the House Speaker John Boehner’s GOP clown show, but perhaps—call it an outside possibility—a more forceful and direct rhetorical shot from the White House could have some impact on the national conversation.
On Tuesday, Obama appeared in the Rose Garden and did angrily denounce the extremist Republicans for causing the shutdown and threatening to turn the coming debt ceiling tussle into another crisis. “That’s not how adults operate,” he declared, ratcheting up the tough talk. But the question remains: is Obama’s language sufficiently descriptive for the situation at hand?
On Wednesday evening, Obama met with congressional leaders at the White House. The 90-minute confab was, as expected, unproductive. Afterward, Boehner told reporters, “All we are asking here is…fairness for the American people.” Fairness? That’s been the call of the Republican crusaders in recent days. They have been unwilling to fund the government at the reduced levels they demanded (via the debt ceiling negotiations of 2011 that yielded the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration) because they are trying to ensure “fairness” on Obamacare.
Can Obama Disrupt the Shutdown Narrative?
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