Waiting For The State of The Union
by digby
Borger: … and we’ve just had a reality check. The deficit commission just came and said we have a huge problem we have now. Now I personally believe that Barack Obama can come out in the state of the union, call for a Deficit Summit call for reforming the tax codes, part of that perhaps being tax increases and calling the Republicans bluff but whether he does that or not …
Yellin: The problem he has is with the left flank of his own party who are basically stupefied that he has endorsed George W. Bush’s central economic policy.
King: And so the question is, has the president made the calculation that “the left might be mad at me, but they won’t desert me in 2012 and so I’m going to cut a deal with Republicans?” The question is, what’s the next step? As you said, does he say in the state of the union, “I’m going to embrace my deficit reduction commission and let’s raise the retirement age for social security and lets get some cuts in medicare and lets get cuts across the government? Is a Democratic president going to do that?
Borger: I think he might. Look, this is about leadership at this point. It’s not about his left flank. It’s about leading the country. And it’s about making sure that he’s not the one leading the country into the ditch he used to talk about in the last campaign. He’s got another ditch he’s got to dig out of. And I think that it requires him to actually lead.
I believe and he believes that the public will reward him for it in the long term and right now his Democrats are going to be angry about it because the Republicans are clever.
King: It is remarkable, I mean remarkable, the number of Democrats who use the word “spine” in that the Democrats say the president doesn’t have one. Now the president says he knows he was going to get criticised but he didn’t want working families to get a three or five thousand dollar tax increase next year.
Yellin: And as he said, that’s a real effect on real people. And the payroll tax holiday and the reduction in the payroll tax will be felt by millions of Americans and will make a real difference. The bottom line is that it’s still a long time for the re-elect and he can figure out how to shape a message and try to get people back on board.
Borger: This is a political deal.
King: I’m shocked that you would say that about Washington DC. [hearty laughter all around]
Borger: Everybody understands that this is a political deal that he had to make. But the next phase is one we really need to pay attention to, what he does in the state of the union.
AB Stoddard on CNN just told me that the President will be happy to meet the Republicans on their issues (free trade and “budget reform”) in the interests of getting things done. She doesn’t think he’ll be bringing up any more contentious items from his own agenda like immigration reform or energy. Then Matt Bai assured everyone that nonetheless the president has nothing to worry about from the left.
Perhaps Bai is right. But I think he will have a huge political problems if he goes through with what I and others have been afraid he’s going to do, and which Robert Kuttner spells out here:
The tax deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is just the first part of a multistage drama that is likely to further divide and weaken Democrats.
The second part, now being teed up by the White House and key Senate Democrats, is a scheme for the president to embrace much of the Bowles-Simpson plan — including cuts in Social Security. This is to be unveiled, according to well-placed sources, in the president’s State of the Union address.
The idea is to pre-empt an even more draconian set of budget cuts likely to be proposed by the incoming House Budget Committee chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), as a condition of extending the debt ceiling. This is expected to hit in April.
White House strategists believe this can also give Obama “credit” for getting serious about deficit reduction — now more urgent with the nearly $900 billion increase in the deficit via the tax cut deal.
That’s been telegraphed pretty strongly from a number of different directions. The new “bi-partisan baseline” achieved by the failed Catfood Commission is now seen as the moderate alternative to Paul Ryan’s roadmap.
Here’s the problem:
Beltway Washington — the editorial writers, columnists, centrist policy organizations, Blue Dogs and, of course, the Obama administration and its Wall Street advisers — has become an echo chamber of bad advice.
Slaying the deficit gets top billing — generating a strong economic recovery is offstage. A smaller deficit is said to promote recovery by increasing confidence — though nobody can give a plausible explanation of the economics.
Destroying government’s capacity for social investment seems now only a tertiary concern for the White House — though a prime Republican goal. In this weird inversion, being willing to sacrifice the Democrats’ best-loved programs is taken as a sign of Democratic resolve.
Obama is finally getting the bipartisanship he craved — but entirely on Republican terms.
(Yes, repeal of DADT is a great liberal achievement. But considering that the Military brass and the Republican civilian leader of the Pentagon endorsed it, it shouldn’t have been such a heavy lift and there is every reason to believe that it’s the last liberal achievement of Obama’s first term. We must now hope for gridlock.)
At the moment, the rank and file of the Democratic Party still supports him and the accolades he’s getting from the beltway are an indication that he’ll get a lot of support from the political establishment if he stays on this course. But Borger is right about one thing. This administration is doing the Republicans’ political dirty work for them and they will thank him for it by turning it back on him in the campaign. Just as they ran thousands of ads saying Obama was gutting medicare, I would bet money that there will be a flood of shadowy independent expenditure ads saying the same about Social Security. And this time, it will actually be true.
My sense is that all this media love over the tax deal will solidify their view that this is a good template for going forward. But if they go after the safety net programs, I think they really will lose some of the base, which may still be supportive but is nervous about the economy like everyone else is, but sees the government role in fixing it quite differently than the Republicans do. Tearing a big hole in the safety net is very risky. The Democratic Big Tent depends on it just as much as the people do. Killing a few obsolete weapons systems in exchange and calling it a compromise isn’t going to work.
All the Villagers say that liberals have nowhere to go, so we need to sip our soy lattes and STFU. But again, there was an election just 10 short years ago when a few liberals went their own way and the results were devastating. It does happen I guess they not only assume that they will win by passing the Republican agenda, but that they will win big. It’s very optimistic.
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