This from Greg Sargent sounds to me their most likely strategy:
"It’s possible we’ll be heading into 2014 with the deficit falling and the economy improving markedly — with Republican candidates calling for more spending cuts and fulminating about Obamacare and fake scandals.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/31/the-morning-plum-republicans-worry-about-attacking-obama-too-aggressively/
I'd say it's a lot more than merely possible.. It's very possible, indeed, quite likely. Although a number of Republicans warn that the party needs an actual affirmative agenda, there's nothing that suggests the party is listening. This looks like 1998 all over again.
What we're actually doing here is hitting the limits of the modern Republican party. They really don't have many weapons in their arsenal. They can do impeded and obstruct and failing that they have fake scandals to monger. A two trick pony and nothing else.
As Josh Marshall argues, Democratic scandals are usually a problem-for Republicans. To be sure, there really is nothing here that's a real Democratic scandal. The IRS issue had nothing to do with the Democratic party-Dan Schulman the man in charge during the supposed sins against the wealthy Tea Party groups was actually a Bush appointee. Benghazi isn't a scandal-the only scandal is how much of Congress' time and resources has been wasted on it.
In the latest case of GOP overreach they tried to make hay by repeatedly saying that Schulman had visited the White House 157 whole times-in reality not nearly that much and most of the time he was there it was about implementation of ObamaCare.
"But now a real reporter (in this case my old friend Garance Franke-Ruta) has looked past the toplines of the White House visitor logs and done frankly just the very basic due diligence that any reporter would do when reporting out a story like this. There are a few problems with the story. First, why on Earth would Shulman need to visit the White House 157 times except to crack down on the Tea Party and other American Patriots? Well, it turns out there’s this thing conservatives have never heard of called OBAMACARE, which actually relies a fair amount on the IRS for implementation."
"It’s possible we’ll be heading into 2014 with the deficit falling and the economy improving markedly — with Republican candidates calling for more spending cuts and fulminating about Obamacare and fake scandals.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/31/the-morning-plum-republicans-worry-about-attacking-obama-too-aggressively/
I'd say it's a lot more than merely possible.. It's very possible, indeed, quite likely. Although a number of Republicans warn that the party needs an actual affirmative agenda, there's nothing that suggests the party is listening. This looks like 1998 all over again.
What we're actually doing here is hitting the limits of the modern Republican party. They really don't have many weapons in their arsenal. They can do impeded and obstruct and failing that they have fake scandals to monger. A two trick pony and nothing else.
As Josh Marshall argues, Democratic scandals are usually a problem-for Republicans. To be sure, there really is nothing here that's a real Democratic scandal. The IRS issue had nothing to do with the Democratic party-Dan Schulman the man in charge during the supposed sins against the wealthy Tea Party groups was actually a Bush appointee. Benghazi isn't a scandal-the only scandal is how much of Congress' time and resources has been wasted on it.
In the latest case of GOP overreach they tried to make hay by repeatedly saying that Schulman had visited the White House 157 whole times-in reality not nearly that much and most of the time he was there it was about implementation of ObamaCare.
"But now a real reporter (in this case my old friend Garance Franke-Ruta) has looked past the toplines of the White House visitor logs and done frankly just the very basic due diligence that any reporter would do when reporting out a story like this. There are a few problems with the story. First, why on Earth would Shulman need to visit the White House 157 times except to crack down on the Tea Party and other American Patriots? Well, it turns out there’s this thing conservatives have never heard of called OBAMACARE, which actually relies a fair amount on the IRS for implementation."
"Take it away Garance …
The public meeting schedules available for review to any media outlet show that very thing: Shulman was cleared primarily to meet with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill. He was cleared 40 times to meet with Obama’s director of the Office of Health Reform, and a further 80 times for the biweekly health reform deputies meetings and others set up by aides involved with the health-care law implementation efforts. That’s 76 percent of his planned White House visits just there, before you even add in all the meetings with Office of Management and Budget personnel also involved in health reform.
"But it gets better. Those 157 visits? Those are times he was ‘cleared’ to visit the White House. The logs only show he actually showed up 11 times. It’s quite possible that the records missed a couple visits. But it seems likely that the story - which originated at The Daily Caller - was off by about ten fold."
Of course, while the GOP continues to fulminate against Obamacare-and have tried to tie the IRS pseudoscandal to it, Obamacare is already fast becoming a success story.
So the Dems will have the lowered deficit, the improving economy and the success of Obamacare to talk about and the GOP is going to be talking about Benghazi and how many times Dan Shulman visited the White House in 2010 and 2011.
It's clear they learned a lot from the 2012 debacle.
P.S. I should hasten to add that as the reader Greg points out, at least in Benghazi we're dealing with a real tragedy-unlike the IRS where the supposed victims actually probably shouldn't be getting the tax exemptions they get.. I agree that's worth looking into but the GOP doesn't really want solutions its just the usual game of political gotcha.
P.S. I should hasten to add that as the reader Greg points out, at least in Benghazi we're dealing with a real tragedy-unlike the IRS where the supposed victims actually probably shouldn't be getting the tax exemptions they get.. I agree that's worth looking into but the GOP doesn't really want solutions its just the usual game of political gotcha.
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