Rove: Obama’s True Aim in Cliff Talks Is to Regain House

While President Barack Obama’s budget proposal to solve the fiscal cliff partly represents an effort to impose his ideology, the president’s fundamental aim is political, says Republican strategist Karl Rove.

“Mr. Obama's real goal is having Democrats recapture the House in 2014 and once again stave off losses in the Senate,” he writes in The Wall Street Journal.

Instead of agreeing to raise tax revenue by cutting loopholes and deductions, which many Republicans accept, Obama is insisting on raising tax rates for the wealthy.

“He apparently believes that Republicans, in a weakened state and defending an unpopular position, might buckle on a central GOP tenet: opposition to any increase in marginal rates,” Rove states.

Urgent: Will Raising Taxes Help or Hurt America?

“That might kick off a Republican civil war, resulting in divisive party primaries in 2014 that leave the president's opposition even more weakened and produce more sub-par candidates like this year's Republican Senate candidates in Indiana and Missouri.”

The strategy is unlikely to work and will probably bounce back to bite Obama, Rove says.

Republicans will control the House for at least the next two years, and Obama’s tactics will make cooperation more difficult. “The less Mr. Obama achieves in the next two years, the more his party suffers in 2014 and perhaps in 2016,” the former George W. Bush aide says.

“Mr. Obama's shortness of vision is puzzling. Ten years from now, what will be more important — that he raised marginal income-tax rates on the wealthy, or that he struck a bargain with new revenues and spending cuts that put America on the road to fiscal health and avoided a damaging crisis?”