President Obama has spent weeks now pushing for gun control legislation which will do one of three things:
• Not make it out of the Senate.
• If it does, it won’t make it out of the House.
• If it makes it out of the House, it will be so watered down that it will annoy his base.
And then there’s the fourth thing, which will happen no matter what:
• Second Amendment voters will be energized like they haven’t been since that other off-year election against a gun-grabbing Democrat President in 1994.
Meanwhile, voter interest in gun control is waning, as it always does after spiking in the wake (can support really spike in a wake?) of a shooting tragedy like Newtown. Passions cool, legislation dies. Just the way it’s supposed to.
Instead, Obama is out there making big gun control speech after big gun control speech, trying to keep that support from flagging. Hey, it worked for ObamaCare!
It didn’t? Oh. Anyway.
I didn’t think the GOP had a puppy’s chance in an industrial blender of re-taking the Senate next year, but Obama’s big push might just help them do the impossible.
But gun control is so earlier-this-week. Just today, the President belatedly released his 2014 budget — which is DOA in the House and which already has the Progressive Left up in arms-they’d-like-to-ban. Here’s the skinny:
But Republicans argue they already consented to increased taxes as part of the fiscal crisis deal and have expressed little interest in negotiating another hike. And liberal Democrats — particularly powerful advocacy groups — have launched a series of campaigns to oppose the changes to Social Security.
Obama’s budget has enough tax hikes and smoke & mirrors for Republicans to reject it outright, and enough Social Security “cuts” to outrage the welfare peddlers. He’s like the donkey that starved to death in between two piles of other people’s money.
This makes two long and drawn-out battles where the President failed to pick a side and stick to it. He’s not in the “sensible middle,” as he likes to claim, but standing on the center line of a dodgeball court, shouting to both teams, “Hey, guys — don’t throw so hard!”
It’s difficult to imagine such tone-deafness coming from the same team that perfectly fixed and froze Mitt Romney almost a full year before the election with distractions like birth control and the phony “War on Women.”
One of those sad-because-its-true observations is that second presidential administrations rarely live up to the first. You’d think that with record long-term unemployment, anemic growth, failures in the Mideast, dangers in the Far East, and all the rest, that Obama in his second term would have nowhere to go but up.
Oops.
Maybe he’s just hoping we’ve been down so long the bottom looks like up.
If not, then four more years ought to do it.
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