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October 4, 2013
Can Obama Disrupt the Shutdown Narrative?
By David Corn
National parks are closed. Food safety inspections have been curtailed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be halting its flu program--just as the flu season is arriving. Of course, hundreds of thousands of American families will have to go without paychecks because a breadwinner employed by the federal government has been furloughed.
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Perhaps it's time for a "have you no decency" moment.At the start of this shutdown-struck week, I published a piece asking whether Barack Obama should "reveal his inner pissed-off president." The point was to wonder if it were time for the president, who usually keeps his cool, to call out the tea party Republican hostage takers as crazies hell-bent on imposing suffering on millions of Americans -- by shuttering the federal government and/or forcing a US government default -- due to their obsessive opposition to Obamacare. It's unclear whether there's anything the president could say that would change the perverse internal dynamic within the House Speaker John Boehner's GOP clown show, but perhaps -- call it an outside possibility -- a more forceful and direct rhetorical shot from the White House could have some impact on the national conversation.
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