How Obama Beats Romney
Worth reading the whole thing. Good stuff!
How Obama Beats Romney
Steve Erickson
October 1, 2012
The debate answer that could secure the president's re-election
snip//
LEHRER: Mr. President, I don’t need to tell you that the issue first and foremost on everyone’s mind is the state of the national economy. You and your campaign, and some in the media, have accused Governor Romney of offering no specifics as to what he would do about the economy should he be elected president. But are you prepared this evening to offer specifics of your own?
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I’m announcing tonight that, if re-elected, I will immediately call the House of Representatives back into session in order to raise the ceiling of our national debt. I would remind my fellow Americans that raising the debt ceiling is not a matter of the government spending more money. It’s a matter of honoring a debt already incurred and thereby preserving our credit rating. I’m sure I don’t have to remind everyone how, last summer, radical Republicans in the House held our economy hostage over this issue and how, as a result, for the first time in history our country’s credit rating was downgraded.
Now we approach a similar debt-ceiling deadline at the end of this year. I’m here to tell you this evening that if the Congress again fails to fulfill its responsibility by November 15, I will exercise the powers enumerated in Article Four of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and raise the debt ceiling myself, through executive action.
It’s not my preference to do it this way. My preference is for the Republicans in Congress do their job. If there are lawmakers who feel I’m overstepping the constraints of my office, let them challenge my action in court. But I’m not going to stand by and let the same people who almost drove our economy over a cliff four years ago, and who almost drove it over a cliff last year, do it again, hurting the country we love in order to advance an extreme ideology. I will take this action to bring a sense of stability to the world markets and so that no nation will wonder if the United States will default on its debt.
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Next, on the night of the election I’ll also call Speaker Boehner and invite him to the White House the following day. There, I’ll offer the speaker the same broad outlines of the “grand bargain” that he and I discussed in the summer of 2011.
This was an agreement that would have cut government spending over the next decade by trillions of dollars. It was an agreement, I might add, that some in my own party weren’t happy about. I’ll resurrect this bargain in the spirit of the same bipartisanship that I tried to pursue during my first term, in the face of a monolithic and hostile Republican opposition for whom the only political priority, since the day I walked into the White House, has been my defeat in next month’s election.
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http://prospect.org/article/how-obama-beats-romney
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