As Peggy Noonan and Ed already opined this morning, all of the scaremongering over the sequester coming from the Obama administration is getting just a tad on the overly dramatic side, with all of the dire predictions about the many ways in which our societal infrastructure will crumble in on itself — and it looks like the White House has identified one of those talking points as having maximum Chicken-Little impact on the general public. Bringing out the Obama administration’s most high-profile ‘Republican’ to do the talking, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood insisted that sequester cuts are “going to be very painful for the flying public” in terms of the delays and cancellations that will start up when the FAA starts furloughing employees:

More from Roll Call:

“I would describe my presence here with one word: Republican,” LaHood said from the White House podium. “They’re hoping that maybe I can influence some of the people in my own party.” …

“I suggest that my former colleagues on the Republican side go see the movie ‘Lincoln,’ because in the move ‘Lincoln’ it shows how hard it was back then to get things done,” he said. “But what Lincoln did was he gathered people around him the way that I believe President Obama is doing by calling Republicans, talking to them, trying to work with them, and when that happens big things get solved.” …

Still, LaHood said, “What I’m trying to do is to wake up members of the Congress on the Republican side to the idea that they need to come to the table, offer a proposal so that we don’t have to have this kind of calamity in air service in America.”

Hold up: It’s actual news when the president bothers to merely telephone the leaders of his opposition in Congress (the same day he shamelessly demagogued the bejeesus out of their motives, by the way), but Obama’s political wheeling-and-dealing tactics are like Lincoln’s? …Rand Paul, for one, is not impressed with the way the White House is playing this: