The White House went back to the future Friday by thrusting former President Bill Clinton onto center stage with President Obama to endorse his tax deal with Republicans in effort to quell a revolt brewing on the left.
Clinton's surprise appearance in the White House briefing room after a private meeting with Obama in the Oval Office gave him a chance to hold court for at least 30 minutes after Obama in a setting that recalled his days as commander in chief.
I generally consider Mike Littwin to be a flaming a-hole, but this piece really cracked me up.
Littwin: In the tax-cut war, liberals won a voice, but little else
Liberals extracted a huge concession in the Bush-tax-cut wars. They got to put on a show.
It was, like many of your popular holiday- season productions, a feel-good show, particularly if you didn't think about it too hard. And you didn't have to watch the whole thing to get the point. If you turned it on for 90 seconds or so, you got the gist — Bernie Sanders talking endlessly to an all but empty Senate chamber — and then you could call your friends and do your own multiplier effect.
And for years, they'll remember Sanders, the very liberal senator from Vermont, and how he spoke for 8 1/2 hours in a faux filibuster, designed as a group catharsis — a primal scream — for all liberals with access to C-SPAN2.
In a deft move, the White House — which was glad to give Sanders the stage and let him talk himself out — counter-programmed with Bill Clinton giving an impromptu news conference in the briefing room. Obama had spoken with Clinton for 90 minutes and then left Clinton to deal with the mess. Clinton looked delighted to be there, and I'm sure he could have done 8 1/2 hours easily. Eventually, Obama, who went to a White House Christmas party, must have wondered how exactly he could suggest to Clinton it was time to, uh, leave.