Seeing the Tea Cup as half full
by digby
Grim and Stein have a great piece out this morning about the relationship between Reid and Obama and the government shutdown, debt ceiling stand-off strategy. Here they talk about the 2011 deal that set the table for our recent showdown:
The president said that he, of course, was unhappy with the various outcomes, but had to deal with different political realities. The message of the 2010 midterm elections had been that the country wanted him to work more closely with Republicans. And when it came to the ending of the Bush-era taxes, he had to uphold his pledge that the middle class would not see a hike. More generally, he worried that the Senate Democratic caucus would end up fractured if the party pushed too hard, leading the administration to cut deals directly with McConnell.
It was a painful jab at Reid, who takes pride in his ability to hold his broad caucus together on even the most fraught legislative battles. “If you’re ever wondering if I can hold my caucus, just ask me,” he told Obama.
I’ll write more about this later, but I want to point out that the “message” of the 2010 midterms could more realistically have been seen as the country wanting the Republicans to stop the president from doing what he had been doing. Perhaps if the president had read the election just a little bit differently, we wouldn’t have had the ensuing disaster of 2011:
“The fact is that Senator Reid was more than a little upset in 2011 when the president and his team kept on trying against all odds to cut a deal on a so-called grand bargain,” said Manley, Reid’s former top spokesman.
And we know how that turned out:
The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand bar[g]ain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start.
It was an accepted part of the understanding — from the start. Really. It was assumed by the Rs on the Supercommittee that came right after: it was assumed in the November-December 2012 negotiations. There may have been big disagreements over rates and ratios — but that it was supposed to be replaced by entitlements and revenues of some form is not controversial.
(Indeed, the discretionary savings amount from the Boehner-Obama negotiations were locked in in BCA [Budget Control Act of 2011]: the sequester was just designed to force all back to table on entitlements and revenues.)
According to Stein and Grim, Reid and Obama were fully on the same page in this recent negotiation. Of course, what the Republicans were asking was to defund Obamacare, so I don’t know just how hard that really was. The White House was never in a million years going to agree to that.
But it does bode well that Reid and Obama worked well together this time. Reid seems much more inclined to hold the line against the Chained-CPI and hopefully he’ll be able to hold the caucus together on that. If not, I’m afraid the White House may want to come in and “cut a deal” with McConnell as they threatened, which probably won’t be good for the people.
.