Ezra Klein channels the White House's latest strategy on the deficit talks:
The president doesn’t think of himself as that kind of Democrat. He believes that there are sensible cuts that can be made to both Medicare and Social Security. He would like to win by governing effectively, by cutting deals with the other party, by making Washington work. He doesn’t want to run a generic Democratic campaign hammering Republicans for being willing to cut Medicare even as they cut taxes on the rich.There are a few issues here.
1. Are the President's goals good, substantively? That's questionable re Medicare and SS.
2. Are they achievable? Depends how he goes about it.
3. What does he have to do to achieve them? It's not clear that "working with" the Republicans ever works, certainly not in today's climate, and especially a year before the presidential elections - it serves the Republicans to stop any progress from happening on anything between now and the elections. Though, there's a silver lining. The GOP controls the House. They need to show some progress, some reason that their continued leadership is justified.
The new theory goes something like this: The first-best outcome is still striking a grand bargain with the Republicans, and it’s more likely to happen if the Republicans worry that Democrats have found a clear, popular message that might win them the election. The better Obama looks in the polls, the more interested Republicans will become in a compromise that takes some of the Democrats’ most potent attacks off the table.Maybe. Or maybe the better Obama looks in the polls the more the GOP will try to destroy him by any means necessary, including lots of lies that, up until now, Team Obama has not been very good at refuting.
But the second-best outcome isn’t necessarily looking like the most reasonable guy in the room. It’s looking like the strongest leader in the room. That’s why Obama, somewhat unusually for him, attached a veto threat to his deficit plan: If the supercommittee sends him a package that cuts benefits for Medicare beneficiaries but leaves the rich untouched, he says he’ll kick the plan back to Congress. Rather than emphasizing his willingness to meet Boehner’s bottom lines, which was the communications strategy during the debt ceiling showdown, he’s emphasizing his unwillingness to bend on his bottom lines.I don't think it's politics as usual at all. It's POLITICS, period. There's this pollyanna view that some people have that politics should be all tea and crumpets, where we the civilized all sit down and exchange niceties while dividing up the world. In America, it doesn't work that way. It feels somewhat naive to think it could.
That isn’t how the White House would prefer to govern. It’s not how they would prefer to campaign. It is, let’s admit it, politics-as-usual. It’s the triumph of the old way of doing things, an admission that Washington proved too hard to change. But it’s also the only option they have left.
The White House has finally shown signs of "manning up," as they like to say. Let's not neuter them so quickly.
