Obama in Baltimore Lowlights By Maureen Dowd

Washington, DC – Liberal New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Maureen Dowd highlighted the Obama lowlights in Baltimore at the GOP House Of Representative’s conference.

In the end, the Republicans may well go back to being inflexibly inflexible with this president, but for a moment in time, each side realized that the other side had something to say. It was, as The Times’s reporters Peter Baker and Carl Hulse called it, a televised marriage-therapy session “as each side vented grievances pent up after a year of partisan gridlock.”

The Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz picked up on the president’s line in the State of the Union about “a deficit of trust.”

“We didn’t create this mess, but we are here to help clean it up,” the freshman member said, before ticking off a litany of things that have soured many Americans on the president who came in trailing fairy dust.

“When you stood up before the American people multiple times and said you would broadcast the health care debates on C-Span, you didn’t,” he said.

And another good one: “You said you weren’t going to allow lobbyists in the senior-most positions within your administration, and yet you did.”

And another: “You said you’d go line by line through the health care bill. And there were six of us, including Dr. Phil Roe, who sent you a letter and said we would like to take you up on that offer. … We never got a call.”

And this rousing finale: “And when you said in the House of Representatives that you were going to tackle earmarks and in fact you didn’t want to have any earmarks in any of your bills, I jumped out of my seat and applauded you.”

But that was another disappointment.

Read More: www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/opinion/31dowd.html