Next Monday, Notre Dame has the near-hopeless task of playing Alabama for college football’s national title. By all accounts, this is a mismatch, featuring the top team from the nation’s strongest conference against an Irish squad that backed into the championship game because so many other teams stumbled. So very few people will be surprised when the Crimson Tide emerges victorious.
This is a good description of what just happened with the fiscal cliff fight in Washington. President Obama entered the battle in a very strong position. A big tax increase automatically was going to happen even if he did nothing, so he was holding all the cards. He could — and did — tell Republicans that they had an unpleasant choice of either accepting that big automatic tax increase or acquiescing to his class-warfare plan.
No wonder Republicans have been acting so discombobulated. They had no winning strategy.
Sure, they could have been more aggressive and threatened to go over the cliff (the automatic tax hike) if Obama wasn’t willing to be reasonable. That’s the strategy I would have pursued, but I’m the first to admit that this would have been a high-risk approach. After all, don’t we all suspect that Obama secretly wants the biggest possible tax hike, even if it also screws the middle class?
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