A liberal ad campaign that prods President Barack Obama to repeal upper-income tax cuts engineered by former President George W. Bush is demonstrating -- perhaps unintentiona
lly -- the difference between campaigning and governing. According to The New York Times, the television spot by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee reruns a 2007 statement by candidate Obama promising to “allow the temporary Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire.”
But the 2011 tax-cut expiration date adopted by Bush and Congress in 2003 coincides with a different political landscape from the one Obama surveyed three years ago. In a lagging economy, an unpopular Democratic president facing a Republican House majority appears ready to compromise on whether to let taxes rise on the rich.
The commercial also shows the incoming House speaker, GOP Rep. John Boehner, saying in September that he, too, would let the higher-income tax cuts expire, absent any alternative. Boehner, however, quickly backtracked under conservative fire and now calls for an across-the-board continuation of the cuts.
© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.