February 10, 2013 07:50 AM UTC

#Obamaquester? Too Clever By Half

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Our friends at the Washington Post report:

Congressional Republicans now have a hashtag for their efforts to pin the blame for the looming sequester on President Obama: #Obamaquester.

President Obama this week ramped up public calls for the GOP’s cooperation on averting the deep automatic spending cuts set to go into effect on March 1. 

The National Republican Campaign Committee and House leadership on Friday began pushing the hashtag #Obamaquester, surfacing an excerpt from Bob Woodward’s book “The Price of Politics,” wherein Obama aide Jack Lew first proposes the deep cuts as a trigger for future action on debt…

But as Natalie Jennings at the Post quickly reminds her readers, the plan for "sequester" cuts in the Budget Control Act of 2011 were approved by a large majority of Republicans–a much greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats in fact–at the end of a long episode where those very same Republicans held the nation hostage in demand of…bigger budget cuts! You remember all of this, don't you? It wasn't that long ago. 

Aaron Blake with some insight as to why this strange little feint is happening:

So in total, more than 70 percent of congressional Republicans voted for the deal that included the sequester, while 58 percent of Democrats voted for it.

In part because of that bipartisan vote, a Romney ad that labeled the sequester as “Obama’s defense cuts” was rated only “half true” by Politifact.

Republicans are engaging in smart political strategy. They know that if the sequester cuts go into effect, there will be a huge amount of blame ready to be heaped on whoever is seen as culpable. And by repeatedly referring to the cuts as Obama’s idea (something that is technically correct), they are trying to win the war of semantics, which the White House has been more successful at in recent months.

First of all, you have to concede that this really is a bold, albiet risky political strategy for the GOP. The kinds of large cuts prescribed by the "sequester" are indeed universally unpopular, and Republicans can point to the fact that the plan for automatic sequester cuts technically does appear to have originated in the White House. In today's media bubble of false equivalency and shallow analysis, Republicans might honestly think they can pivot to becoming the saviors of many of the same popular programs that they have spent so many years threatening. You'll recall that Republicans in Colorado tried this too with regard to education funding in 2011.

The problem, of course, is that it's an absolute load of crap.

Polling has demonstrated consistently that voters absolutely know who to blame for the last few years of manufactured budget crises in Washington. The long fiscal battles between the post-2010 Republican Congress and President Barack Obama left a lasting impression on the electorate, and directly contributed to Republican losses in last November's elections. The voters know who has been threatening to cut programs they value all this time. They know the "sequester," whoever it was that may have come up with the idea, was an appeasement of an ideoligically fixated GOP–hell-bent on slashing government at all levels.

With the "Obamaquester," the GOP's desire to run away from their own record veers into the farcical.