The Washington Post reports that the White House is following a plan to avoid negotiating over the “fiscal cliff”:
Two senior White House officials said that David Plouffe, Obama’s top political adviser, crafted a plan to keep the president from getting sucked into a long, public negotiation like the one that unfolded over the debt ceiling. They said that Obama’s lowest moments in his first term came in a six-month stretch of 2011 when he acted as negotiator-in-chief on the annual federal spending bills and the effort to lift the Treasury’s borrowing authority, becoming part of the image a dysfunctional Washington.
“The last thing we want is another month of images of the two of them negotiating,” one senior official said. The White House is determined that Obama “not be drawn to that level.”
This president never learned to cut deals (he never had any occasion to learn) but he knows how to campaign, so they decided to do that instead.
(Via Power Line.)
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