http://www.salon.com/news/budget_showdown/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2011/08/01/debt_ceiling
Budget Showdown
Monday, Aug 1, 2011 06:02 ET
The myth of Obama's "blunders" and "weakness"
By Glenn Greenwald
With the details of the pending debt deal now emerging (and for a
very good explanation of the key terms, see this post by former
Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein), a consensus is
solidifying that (1) this is a virtually full-scale victory for
the GOP and defeat for the President (who all along insisted on a
"balanced" approach that included tax increases), but (2) the
President, as usual, was too weak in standing up to right-wing
intransigence -- or simply had no options given their willingness
to allow default -- and was thus forced into this deal against his
will. This depiction of Obama as occupying a largely powerless,
toothless office incapable of standing up to Congress -- or, at
best, that the bad outcome happened because he's just a weak
negotiator who "blundered" -- is the one that is invariably
trotted out to explain away most of the bad things he does.
It appears to be true that the President wanted tax revenues to be
part of this deal. But it is absolutely false that he did not
want these brutal budget cuts and was simply forced -- either by
his own strategic "blunders" or the "weakness" of his office --
into accepting them. The evidence is overwhelming that Obama has
long wanted exactly what he got: these severe domestic budget cuts
and even ones well beyond these, including Social Security and
Medicare, which he is likely to get with the Super-Committee
created by this bill (as Robert Reich described the bill: "No tax
increases on rich yet almost certain cuts in Med[icare] and Social
Security . . . . Ds can no longer campaign on R's desire to
Medicare and Soc Security, now that O has agreed it").
Last night, John Cole -- along with several others -- promoted
this weak-helpless-President narrative by asking what Obama could
possibly have done to secure a better outcome. Early this
morning, I answered him by email, but as I see that this is the
claim being pervasively used to explain Obama's acceptance of this
deal -- he was forced into it by the Tea Party hostage-takers --
I'm reprinting that email I wrote here. For those who believe
this narrative, please confront the evidence there; how anyone can
claim in the face of all that evidence that the President was
"forced" into making these cuts -- as opposed to having eagerly
sought them -- is mystifying indeed. And, as I set forth there,
there were ample steps he could have taken had he actually wanted
leverage against the GOP; the very idea that negotiating steps so
obvious to every progressive pundit somehow eluded the President
and his vast army of advisers is absurd on its face.
Here's The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn -- who, as he says, with
some understatement, is usually "among [Obama's] staunchest
defenders in situations like these" -- on what these guaranteed
cuts mean (never mind the future cuts likely to come from the
Super Committee):
As Robert Greenstein, of the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, pointed out in a recent statement about a different
proposal, there’s just no way to enact spending reductions of this
magnitude without imposing a lot of pain. And contrary to the
common understanding in the Washington cocktail party circuit,
“pain” does not simply mean offending certain political
sensibilities. Pain means more people eating tainted food, more
people breathing polluted air, more people pulling their kids out
of college, and more people losing their homes -- in other words,
the hardships people suffer when government can't do an adequate
job of looking out for their interests.
As I wrote back in April when progressive pundits in D.C. were so
deeply baffled by Obama's supposed "tactical mistake" in not
insisting on a clean debt ceiling increase, Obama's so-called "bad
negotiating" or "weakness" is actually "shrewd negotiation"
because he's getting what he actually wants (which, shockingly, is
not always the same as what he publicly says he wants). In this
case, what he wants -- and has long wanted, as he's said
repeatedly in public -- are drastic spending cuts. In other
words, he's willing -- eager -- to impose the "pain" Cohn
describes on those who can least afford to bear it so that he can
run for re-election as a compromise-brokering, trans-partisan
deficit cutter willing to "take considerable heat from his own
party."
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