You remember Crossroads GPS? Carl Rove’s consortium of shadowy big bucks donors who finance what we laughingly designate “issue” ads prior to big political campaigns? I’m betting that the Daddy Warbucks behind the group are sitting back and congratulating themselves on their wisdom in investing in helping the public understand Roy Blunt’s issues in 2010. They are perhaps beginning to see some concrete returns on their investment.
According to PoliticMO, Blunt has gone from muttering invectives against the President, who has the gall to propose increasing taxes on “job creators” (i.e., rich people), and sputtering about “job-killing” regulations, to proposing a little action. Or, actually, make that inaction, since he is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban any new regulations for a year. According to Blunt:
I’ve met with countless job creators in Missouri who have told me that regulatory uncertainty is one of the greatest obstacles to growing their businesses
There’re those job creators again. Makes you wonder how much Blunt takes in after a listening session with well-healed corporate contributors, uh … job creators.
Also of note: the reference to business “uncertainty” coming from a member of the party that threatened to shut down the government, and may be planning to repeat the whole hostage process again; caused the first-ever U.S. credit downgrade; and helped overturn a longish period during which the stock market seemed to be recovering. Doesn’t Senator Blunt think that politically motivated hi-jinks like these might be responsible for some of that uncertainity he is so worried about?
And while we’re talking abut chutzpah, what is it in our political environment that permits a politician like Blunt to propose, with a straight face, to kill regulations – across the board, with no consideration of their goals and the situation they are designed to address – after we have just experienced a near depression that is uniformly acknowledged to have been the result of lax financial regulation for which he personally, as a member of past GOP leadership, bears no small smattering of blame.
As I said earlier, the Crossroads GPS money men are no doubt more than satisfied with their boy Blunt. So much so, in fact, that they are already beginning their assault on Claire McCaskill’s Senate seat.