A spotlight on Obama's demagoguery

You lie! Reporters accuse Obama of deception, demagoguery just to get attention

Prominent Washington correspondents are accusing President Obamaand his aides of knowingly stretching the truth on issues like the so-called women's pay gap just to create controversy and keep issues -- and the president -- relevant.

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus kicked off the attack last week when she blasted as “demagoguery” the administration's tactics during the pay gap debate. “The level of hyperbole -- actually, of demagoguery -- that Democrats have engaged in here is revolting,” she wrote.

CBS White House Correspondent Major Garrett then weighed in this week in his National Journal column. He revealed that the White House has a name for it's deceptive tactics: “Stray voltage.”

Basically, it’s an effort of creating a controversy for the sake of having a controversy to put an issue before the public and make the president’s position prominent. He wrote that the administration’s made-up claim that women earn 77-cents for every man was “stray voltage in action” because it created a food fight over the 77-cent figure, allowing the White House to strike at GOP foes.

Garrett has written about the tactic before, crediting Obama senior advisor David Plouffe with coining it. “The theory goes like this: Controversy sparks attention, attention provokes conversation, and conversation embeds previously unknown or marginalized ideas in the public consciousness. This happens, Plouffe theorizes, even when—and sometimes especially when—the White House appears defensive, besieged, or off-guard,” he wrote.

His column was followed by Slate's John Dickerson who called the process trolling. He wrote:

“Under this approach, a president wants the fact-checkers to call him out (again and again) because that hubbub keeps the issue in the news, which is good for promoting the issue to the public. It is the political equivalent of ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’ or the quote attributed to Mae West (and others): ‘I don't care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.’ The tactic represents one more step in the embrace of cynicism that has characterized President Obama's journey in office.”

Once Dickerson’s column came out, the National Republican Senatorial Committee pushed out a release Thursday also noting the criticism. “How desperate is the White House to maintain control of the Senate? Desperate enough to reduce the president to trolling,” they said.

The public must be seeing what the reporters are too. Our Charles Hoskinson posted a story Thursday about a Fox News poll finding that 61 percent believe Obama lies at least some of the time on important issues.

Do you remember the ballyhooed Lilly Leadbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009? So it wasn't what they really wanted. What the left wants is salaries determined by the government implemented by the industry so like with Obamacare the politicians get to blame private business for it's enforcement.

The Democrat leftists are stuck in a time warp when it comes to pay. These equal pay arguments are only cogent if you are dealing with jobs that are easily interchangeable such as assembly line work. How  can you have equal pay debates when nothing about the people or job requirements are equal. It's the cubicle mentality. Make everybody a G - rated drone and the world will applaud...how collectivist and anti individual.