Reply #7: This is what he's "got" ---> [View All]

For months, senior Republican lawmakers have been hammering Mr. Obama for what they have said is his refusal to confront the country’s mounting debt and entitlement crisis. They have bluntly accused him of failing to offer the country adult leadership on an issue of grave concern... Mr. Boehner declared the nation’s debt to be a “moral threat” to the country and chided the president for failing to offer a serious proposal for dealing with it. As Republicans prepared to pass a budget that included an overhaul of Medicare, Mr. Boehner vowed “real leadership” on the issue of the debt.

“We cannot continue to borrow recklessly, dig ourselves deeper into this hole and mortgage the future of our children and grandchildren,” Mr. Boehner said... “If the president won’t lead, we will,” he added. “No more kicking the can down the road, no more whistling past the graveyard — now is the time to address the serious challenges that face the American people, and we will.”

Now, Mr. Obama is seizing on those words by pushing Mr. Boehner to go even further than Republicans are prepared to go: a $4 trillion deficit reduction proposal that would be larger and more ambitious than the Republican approach... To be sure, the specifics of what Mr. Obama is proposing are far from what the Republicans want. He is insisting that the plan include tax increases in the later years of the plan that conservatives oppose. And he is refusing to accept the Republican approach to changing Medicare into a voucher-based program.... politically, the president and his aides are hoping that his willingness to embrace a comprehensive solution — and Mr. Boehner’s decision to back away from one — will turn on its head the repeated questioning of his willingness to, well, lead. In his news conference on Monday, the president noted the irony.

“I’ve been hearing from my Republican friends for quite some time that it is a moral imperative for us to tackle our debt and our deficits in a serious way,” Mr. Obama said, in what could be read as a reference to Mr. Boehner’s April speech. “And so what I’ve said to them is, ‘Let’s go.’”

Later in the news conference, Mr. Obama again appeared to call on Republicans to deliver on their own demands.

“We keep on talking about this stuff and we have these high-minded pronouncements about how we’ve got to get control of the deficit and how we owe it to our children and our grandchildren,” Mr. Obama said. “Well, let’s step up. Let’s do it.”

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/whos-the-real-leader-in-debt-talks/?hp

Of course, Lawrence O'Donnell's knew what was up all along:

"What you are now witnessing is the most masterful rope-a-dope ever performed by a president against an opposition party in Congress."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=433&topic_id=708395&mesg_id=708395