Handicapping in Hindsight

Does anyone have a final count on how many times this week Fox All-star Mara Liasson characterized the President's first term accomplishments as "Easy." She may have even used expressions like "Candy" and "Cake." Now I like cake and candy as much as the next person (assuming the next person likes it a lot) but I don't understand why Mara is insisting on saying these things, especially in the large quantity in which she is saying them. I think that Mort Kondracke may have expressed a similar opinion, waving away tax cuts as if they were the secret hope of every congressman and senator in Washington. I think that Fred Barnes finally got tired of it too, because he said something like "No one said it was easy at the time!"

And he's exactly right. In the last four years no one said "Oh, it will be easy to get Congress to agree to tax cuts."

To her credit, Mara tried to defend her repeated statements by saying that while members of Congress may not want things like tax cuts, the people in America want them.

Yeah...moments like that make me wonder if she's been paying attention. Lots of people are somewhat silly and don't want tax cuts...they want welfare or national health care or a myriad of other government programs that the tax cut money would finance.

Additionally, if the majority of American people really wanted tax cuts, then 40 Senators would not be voting against it along with X number of Democratic Congressmen. They all have to be re-elected and if tax reductions were such a beloved favorite of the American people at large, then Congress would support it as an act of self-preservation and then it would, in fact, have been easy for the President.

This scenario however, is decidedly not the case.

The President worked hard in the first term, from tax cuts, to Afghanistan to homeland security to Iraq and beyond. In the second term, it's clear that he plans to work even harder. Perhaps four years from now, the difficult things he accomplished will make the first term look like a breeze, but that will never mean that it was in fact, easy.