More on the new austerity campaign
by digby
Matt Yglesias makes the right point on the Ryan pick: the campaign is now about competing deficit plans.
There’s an ineluctable math built into the current federal budget that is forcing choices onto the table that make everyone think their own plan is moderate and their rivals are wild-eyed radicals. Never overestimate the impact of a vice presidential pick on a presidential campaign, but insofar as choosing Ryan makes a difference, the difference is to further focus attention on this choice.
But attention is to an extent a zero-sum game. And focusing attention on the big-picture disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about long-term fiscal policy means we won’t be focusing attention on what ought to be the most pressing economic policy issue of our time—mass unemployment and the tragic waste of human and economic potential it represents. To be sure, politicians will still talk about this. But obviously Obama would prefer at this point to talk about long-term vision and the contrast between his “balanced approach” and the GOP’s cut-cut-cut approach. With Ryan on the ticket, he more and more gets his way. Which means conservatives also get their way. Romney doesn’t just run as “Mr Fix-It” who’ll clean up the mess, he’s running as an ideological candidate with a major vision for changing the country. But that means the terrible economic performance since 2009 and the large jobs deficit built up during that period are going to receed further into the rearview mirror. Romney is essentially conceding that the past 18 months of 150,000 jobs per month are good enough to get Obama re-elected, and he needs to wage a campaign about something bigger.
Which means that, a bit weirdly, the issue that ought to dominate the campaign is going to fade into obscurity.
You’ll notice that this great debate only features two competing ideas: the “drastic cuts in exchange for some small tax hikes for millionaires” and “drastic cuts.” (I guess the perfect compromise would be “even smaller tax hikes for the millionaires and drastic cuts.”) But no matter what, the one thing we can all agree on is that whatever ails our economy is nothing that firing a few more government workers can’t cure.
I’ve thought about this for a couple of days now and I still don’t know whether it’s better for this to be part of the campaign in the (probably vain) hope that R&R will force the Democrats into a defensive posture on the so-called entitlements they can’t get out of or whether the more we talk about it publicly the more the public will believe there’s no other option and give either winner a mandate to slash the hell out of government. I just don’t know.
But it’s going to be a big part of the campaign for the next two months no matter what so I guess we’ll find out. At least the lame duck session brought to you by Pete Peterson won’t be a surprise.
BTW: There is an alternative deficit reduction plan that nobody will hear about. And hey, we could just agree to raise some taxes on the wealthy who are currently drowning in a sea of money and then table the rest of the deficit reduction crap until the economy improves and we can see where we are. But it’s looking more and more like we’re going to be “grown-ups”. And it’s “grown-ups” who caused this mess in the first place. It’s “grown-ups” who cause all the messes.
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