March 24, 2009 07:51 PM UTC

Obama Takes Aim at "Party of No"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Highlighting an issue that we’ve been discussing here in Colorado, President Obama is taking Republicans to task for opposing everything and not offering their own solutions to the economic crisis:

Gearing up for negotiations with Congress over his proposed budget, President Obama chided Republican lawmakers Monday for opposing his initiatives without offering alternatives.

“I do think that the Republican Party right now hasn’t sort of figured out what it’s for,” Obama said in a White House interview with The Courier-Journal and reporters from five other newspapers. “And so as a proxy, they’ve just decided ‘we’re going to be against whatever the other side is for.’ That’s not what’s needed in an economic crisis.”

He added that “you could play that game maybe in the early ’90s, when basically we were pretty prosperous. Right now, everybody’s got to pull together.”

Congressional Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have unleashed a flurry of attacks on the president’s proposed $3.6 trillion budget plan.

McConnell has said Obama’s budget “spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much.” Other Republicans have said the potential impact of the president’s plan on the nation’s debt is unsustainable.

As we’ve said in discussions about the “Party of No” here in Colorado, Republicans aren’t helping themselves by resisting everything while not offering up their own alternatives instead. Republicans would be far better off in 2010 running on a platform of “cautious change” rather than just opposing everything that Democrats put forth in regards to the economy. Because if the economy turns around by 2010, Democrats will get all the credit; if it doesn’t, Republicans won’t be able to say “we told you so” unless their own solutions were rejected.