House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, called for President Obama not to fail where Bill Clinton succeeded in balancing the budget, recalling the Clinton years as an implicit rejection of the idea that balancing the budget requires extreme cuts.
“This week, House Republicans will vote on a plan to balance the federal budget in 10 years,” Boehner says in a new video released by his office. We’ve done it before. Back in the 1990s, Republicans in Congress and President Clinton made it a bipartisan priority. President Obama could do the same thing. But he says he doesn’t want to balance the budget just for the heck of it.”
Boehner argued that balancing the budget will help the economy. “[Obama] can leave our kids and grandkids with a weaker economy and a mountain of debt,” he said, “or he can be a president who had the courage to work across the aisle and balance our budget.”
Obama and Bill Clinton have had a well-known rivalry with each other, though that seemed put to rest by the time Clinton spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
