Barney Frank, Fast on His Feet

RUSH: Barney Frank had a press conference today. I saw this press conference. It happened after the program here had already started. One of the things that Barney Frank said in his press conference, ‘We’re very positive toward the incoming Obama administration, but in this case, we are Reaganites: Trust, but verify.’ Now, what does this mean? What is Barney Frank suspicious of? I think this goes back to a couple things I said last hour and something Barney said. He thinks Obama is way in over his head in terms of thinking he can bring people together with the power of his personality, ’cause Barney says he knows these conservatives, and he knows how rotten to the core they are, and he knows how they don’t cave. He’s been there and sees it, and he doesn’t think that Obama can persuade these conservatives to go along, he thinks Obama’s a little bit too impressed with himself. You know, for everything you want to say about Barney Frank, the one thing, he is not intellectually stupid. He’s wrong on a lot of things, but he’s smart and a very quick study.

What I think Barney is aware of is he knows Obama’s not being specific here. And he’s going to make the specificity come from Barney and his gang, and Barney doesn’t want to go alone here, and Pelosi doesn’t want to go alone. They are going to want some Republican support for some of this stuff when it doesn’t work. Barney’s not going to let Obama get away with just being a figurehead sitting up there pretending to be president and playing the game. There’s a story here today, we got a bunch of them, they’ve been running all week. Now again, remember my admonition from earlier in the week: Do not believe the template in which Drive-By stories are presented because there is an effort on the part of the Drive-Bys to portray Obama as a moderate, harmless centrist, while the country moves left and while he gets 95% of what he wants right off the bat. This is from Stephen Ohlemacher from the AP: ‘President-elect Barack Obama’s proposed tax cuts ran into opposition–‘ Opposition? Opposition? John Kerry, uh, Kent Conrad? They don’t like this $3,000 tax credit for companies that hire new workers. They don’t like it. Not for the right reason, though. It’s funny. They think the money could be better spent.

The real reason to oppose this is nobody’s going to hire somebody at a cost of 50 or $60,000 when they have no work for them just to get a $3,000 tax break. It isn’t going to happen. And when they don’t do it, Obama’s going to be able to point fingers at small business or business and say, ‘See, they wouldn’t help us out of the recession. They didn’t avail themselves of my plan.’ I think the ultimate game here is to be able to blame all this, when it fails, on the private sector for not taking advantage of the gifts that the Obama administration offered. But still there’s this opposition. Is there really opposition, or is this just a mechanism to present Obama as a centrist?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

We now have the audio of Barney Frank who I said earlier is fast, smart on his feet. This was press conference in Washington today.

FRANK: Members, particularly on the Democratic side, have a great deal of confidence in the new president and in the people he’s appointed, but in this case we are Reaganites. We intend to ‘trust but verify,’ and, uhh, and, uh, we’re going to verify in advance. We’re going to put some requirements in there, and, uh, to their credit, uh, Secretary Summers addressed the Democratic Caucus this morning. Secretary Geitner, who was quoted widely today, ummm, they understand and they don’t differ with us.

RUSH: This is going to be a good old-fashioned cluster you-know-what. This is going to be a circus. But it’s dangerous. We’ll laugh watching these clowns, but I’m telling you, folks: We are so-so screwed. We are just, oh, so screwed.