President Obama has launched a campaign to push his tax hikes by granting interviews to local TV news programs in eight states whose viewers will likely be affected by budget cuts as a result of sequestration.
The goal of Obama’s local interviews is to halt $85 billion in budget cuts. The five-minute segments were granted to stations in states that have a high military presence. Adding weight to Obama’s local TV interview campaign, the Pentagon announced cost-saving layoffs of up to 800,000 civilian employees who will be furloughed for 22 days.
In the interviews, Obama warned of the potential job loss that might occur in those eight states and blamed Republicans for the sequester.
“What I say to them is that there’s no reason they should be furloughed, there’s no reason they should lose their jobs or be laid off. This is a problem Congress can solve,” Obama told a station in Maryland.
Obama has spent a lot of time attacking Republicans over the sequestration policy that will force an across the board $85 billion cut in government spending, but the whole plan was originally a White House idea.
The sequestration policy was an idea created by the White House and pushed by Democrat Senate Majority leader Harry Reid; even the left-leaning PolitiFact fact-checking website has admitted as much.
Even as Obama has continued to say that sequestration is the Republican’s fault, PolitiFact points out that the President’s claim is “mostly false.” Last October, PolitiFact noted that “Obama can’t rightly say the sequester isn’t his.”
The President circumventing the White House Press Corps to directly appeal to other media outlets has been a standard habit, too. It’s become so blatant that even the left-wing outlets Slate and Politico have complained about the President’s refusal to engage with them.
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