Following the passage of legislation by both the House and Senate that would raise the federal borrowing limit and end the partial government shutdown, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer cast doubt on the future prospects of congressional Republicans finding common ground with President Barack Obama.
Krauthammer said not to expect Obama to deviate from his previous negotiations with Republican lawmakers on a special broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Special Report.” He likened the interactions between Obama and the GOP to the Peanuts comic strip characters Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt, in which Lucy always pulls the football away right when she’s holding it for Charlie Brown to kick it.
“This is Lucy and the football, squared,” Krauthammer said. “Every time Obama has had a chance to do the thing that you would expect him to do if he has the vision of the world that most of us do, which is deficit is insupportable, we’re going over a cliff. We can see the future. It’s happening in Europe. The entitlement state is unsustainable. You’ve got to do something. All of us sort of know that instinctively. He is not interested. The reason? Everybody has a tactical explanation for why on this occasion he said no and on that occasion. ‘Elections coming up. It has to do with count.’”
Krauthammer went on to say it’s not in Obama’s nature to broker deals with the other side of the aisle, due to his ideology and vision to transform the United States into a liberal social democracy.
“The man is not interested in that,” he continued. “He’s a man of the left. He believes that Europe — that that is the kind of social democratic system in Europe, entitlement state safety net — that is the just society that community organizer is thinking of. And that is why time after time he turns it down and that is why I predict he will again turn it down, even though he can have a great political victory on tax reform. He won’t accept it, unless you raise taxes.”