Democrats Capitulate To Tea Party’s ‘Raw Extortion’|SPOTLIGHT

slash the deficit in half, but that’s an item that Republicans insisted was off the negotiating table.

In his July 22 press conference, Obama acknowledged he had been exceedingly generous in his overtures to Republicans.

“Essentially, what we had offered Speaker Boehner was over a trillion dollars in cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and defense,” Obama said. “We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.”

Here’s the kicker: “We were offering a deal that called for as much discretionary savings as the Gang of Six [a panel Democratic and Republican lawmakers]. We were calling for taxes that were less than what the Gang of Six had proposed.”

Boehner responded to Obama’s gesture by ending the negotiations and refusing to return Obama’s phone calls. Therein lies the difference between Obama and Boehner. The latter listens to his base and then moves quickly in its direction. Obama, on the other hand, repeatedly boasts that he is willing to ignore the wishes of his base when attempting to strike a deal with House conservatives.

“The president got the only thing that was nonnegotiable from his perspective: a big enough increase in the debt limit to ensure he doesn’t have a repeat of this fiasco during the 2012 campaign, which would make him look fatally weak,” wrote Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

In the wake of the deficit deal, Obama has tried to put a happy face on the ugly deal. The administration has put out a “fact sheet” that claims the agreement, “Stays true to the President’s commitment to shared sacrifice by preventing the middle class, seniors and those who are most vulnerable from shouldering the burden of deficit reduction. The President did not agree to any entitlement reforms outside of the context of a bipartisan committee process where tax reform will be on the table and the President will insist on shared sacrifice from the most well-off and those with the most indefensible tax breaks.”

We’ve heard similar talk for the past two years. And the end result has been the president giving in to political extortion.

George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. He can be reached through his website, www.georgecurry.com You can also follow him at www.twitter.com/currygeorge.

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