Since Barack Obama became president, Karl Rove has become one of his leading intellectual critics on the right, with his weekly Wall Street Journal column, his regular appearances as a paid commentator for Fox News, and in other media appearance as he hawks his new memoir, Courage and Consequences.
Scheduled to go one-on-one with Barack Obama's chief political strategist, David Plouffe on ABC's This Week on Sunday morning, Rove came loaded for bear, acting like he'd consumed a couple of Double Mochas in the green room as he showed nothing but disdain for anything Plouffe had to say. Brandishing a chalk board with various financial figures , Rove emphasized several times that the bill the House was to vote on included doubling certain provisions, meaning the bill that the CBO charted as cutting the deficit, actually now raises it.
ROVE: … if you just look at what they double-count, and it's $720 billion if you count what they ignore in here. These people are double-counting $53 billion worth of Social Security revenue twice, once for Social Security, once to pay to this program; $70 billion for the new long-term care premium, they count it for the premium program and then for paying for this program. They count $500 billion worth of Medicare cuts twice. They ignore $208 billion in Medicare doc fixes that they just put off to the side and said we'll — we'll pay for that later and $30 billion in Medicaid doc fixes…
Plouffe then interjected some recent history:
PLOUFFE: Well, you know, listen, Karl and the Republicans would be familiar with that, since under their leadership, they took us from big budget surpluses at the beginning of the last decade to a $1.3 trillion deficit by not paying for things like the prescription drug plan, two wars, big tax cuts.
So, no, this is — the Congressional Budget Office is very clear. Over the next two decades, this is going to cut the deficit by over a trillion dollars.
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2010.