Obama’s Pay Freeze: A Move toTriangulation

It was Republicans who came up with the idea for a pay freeze for federal government workers, but it was President Barack Obama who made the proposal to implement it Monday. That decision may be the first step in a move toward the center – “triangulation” – by Obama following huge Republican gains in this month’s elections, The Hill reports.

But the president may end up pleasing no one. He took a lot of heat from unions and liberal groups for his decision. They charge that he’s abandoning the middle class for political gain. And Republicans stress that it was they who first recommended a pay freeze, and they criticize Obama for not going far enough in the two-year plan.

“Without a hiring freeze, a pay freeze won’t do much to rein in a federal bureaucracy that added hundreds of thousands of employees to its payroll over the last two years while the private sector shed millions of jobs,” incoming House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a statement.