Obama's Second-to-Last Trolling of the Nation: Open Thread

Byron York says that Obama has a political strategy behind his behaving like a fucking asshole every single day.

Politically, President Obama has never been weaker, after losing both House and Senate. At the same time, he has never talked tougher. There is a connection between the two.

...

"The reason he is being aggressive is that he knows he can generate a response," says a well-connected Republican strategist. "When he does an executive order, what he is trying to do is generate a response so that the entire conversation is about what he did -- so that he has defined the agenda."

Likewise, when Obama, facing a newly-empowered conservative Congress, uses his State of the Union speech to propose a tax plan the liberal columnist E.J. Dionne calls "genuinely redistributive," he is trying to dictate the terms of the debate with a powerful adversary. Of course Obama knows his plan is anathema to Republicans, but if they debate the president on his terms, he makes progress.

"It works if we let it work," says the Republican strategist. "When Obama says something, the question is: Is that the most important thing we should be talking about now, or should we be setting the agenda? Is it something that we have to immediately engage and begin talking about? Which means he has set the agenda."

Well it's great that the GOP can see the trap they're going to walk right into. (I say the latter based on hard-earned experience in watching them walk into more traps than Wile E. Coyote.)

Oh, I'll do what I usually do: I'll snark at this asshole for about fifteen minutes then I will begin talking about something less unpleasant, like gout.

posted by Ace at 08:34 PM

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