President Obama quickly signed the debt-ceiling bill following Senate passage yesterday — and even more quickly redeclared class warfare.
Speaking in the Rose Garden, the president pointedly declared, “You can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts” — code for “taxes must go up,” because Democrats dare not say so directly.
Then came the kicker: “The wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations [must] pay their fair share.”
Never mind that the tax hikes he has in mind would pulverize small business while picking the pockets of people who are by no means among “the wealthiest Americans.”
It’s enough that Obama’s remarks suggest that he still hasn’t learned anything from the shellacking he and his party took at the polls last November — or, indeed, from the defeat he was handed in the just-concluded debt negotiations.
As this week’s votes on the debt ceiling neared, Obama continued to push for “revenue” — i.e., higher taxes — long after the leaders of his own party had quit.
Not to mention increased spending for social benefits, entitlements and government make-work “job creation.”
What the president delivered was his basic campaign speech for 2012 — soak-the-rich rhetoric that pretends to protect the middle class.
The GOP, meanwhile, was redefining the debate away from the Obama-Democratic approach — how much to raise taxes and how much to increase spending.
For all the faction-fighting among House Republicans, the party fundamentally won the contest because Democratic rhetoric has been losing its appeal beyond the party’s hard-core ideological base — and everybody except the ideologues knows that.
The result was a deal that failed to cut spending nearly enough, but said no to new taxes.
Yes, the president made clear yesterday that he considers the matter far from closed.
We suspect that it is — that the American people understand fundamentally that the problem with Washington isn’t insufficient revenue, but overly enthusiastic spending.
And they’re sick of it.