I'm not posting this because it's Taibbi (though there's that added great-prose benefit). I'm posting this because he's right — and everything in Obama's behavior points to it.
Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone (h/t David Sirota; my emphases):
That Republicans are holding up what should be a routine, if unpleasant, decision to raise the debt ceiling in order to portray themselves as the uncompromising defenders of the budget-balancing faith (a howling idiocy in itself, given what went on during the Bush years) is obvious to most rational observers. It's the obvious play for the lame-duck party entering an election year, and they're playing it, with the requisite hysteria.And what is Mr. Douthat saying? Stuff like this:
But what is becoming equally obvious, to both sides, is that the Obama White House is using this same artificial calamity to pitch its own increasingly rightward tilt to voters in advance of the 2012 elections.
It has been extremely interesting in the last weeks to see observers on both sides of the aisle make this point. Just yesterday, the inimitable New York Times conservative Ross Douthat listed Obama's not-so-secret rightward push as a the first in a list of reasons why the Republicans should dig in even more, instead of making a sensible deal[.]
Barack Obama wants a right-leaning deficit deal. For months, liberals have expressed frustration with the president’s deficit strategy. The White House made no effort to tie a debt ceiling vote to the extension of the Bush tax cuts last December. It pre-emptively conceded that any increase in the ceiling should be accompanied by spending cuts. And every time Republicans dug in their heels, the administration gave ground.That's Ross Douthat speaking, not Taibbi.
The not-so-secret secret is that the White House has given ground on purpose. ... Obama’s political team wants to use the leverage provided by those cra-a-a-zy Tea Partiers to make Democrats live with bigger spending cuts than they normally would support.
Matt thinks Douthat thinks that the Right should hold out for an even-more-rightward deal than Obama wants, in a game that could be called "Are you more Conservative than this? How about this? Now how about this?" (my formulation), with each side upping than ante until (Douthat presumes) Obama is dragged too far right for even his political team, or election chances.
In the meantime, Taibbi notes that Paul Krugman is saying much the same thing, but from the left:
Some of what we’re hearing is presumably coming from the political team, whose members seem to believe that a move toward Republican positions, reminiscent of former President Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” in the 1990s, is the key to Mr. Obama’s re-election.(Our post on that article will be up shortly.)
In other words, Obama's mask is slipping, and the scales are falling rapidly from increasingly perceptive eyes. After an excellent mulling of these thoughts, Taibbi concludes the obvious, by saying what's finally obvious:
The blindness of the DLC-era "Third Way" Democratic Party continues to be an astounding thing. For more than a decade now they have been clinging to the idea that the path to electoral success is social liberalism plus laissez-faire economics – in other words, get Wall Street and corporate America to fund your campaigns, and get minorities, pro-choice and gay marriage activists (who will always frightened into loyalty by the Tea Party/Christian loonies on the other side) to march at your rallies and vote every November. They've abandoned the unions-and-jobs platform ... That [Democrats] won't do these things [support unions, wages, fair taxes, and the health & safety net] because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that they want to go into that briar patch.That's Taibbi — color him unconfused and fully de-scaled (ocularly speaking).
But wait, maybe Team Smarter Than You is onto something. Maybe that Third Way, get-the-undecideds thing will work like it did with Clinton. What do you think?
Sorry, that answer's too easy. (1) Clinton rode a bubble; Obama's riding a bust.
(2) These are your discerning undecideds, courtesy of Chris Hayes, writing about his experience canvassing for voters in Wisconsin in 2004:
Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We're giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house, she still couldn't make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn't have much luck.Not the brightest, most discerning beasts in the forest.
Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don't enjoy politics. Political junkies tend to assume that undecided voters are undecided because they don't care enough to make up their minds. But while I found that most undecided voters are, as one Kerry aide put it to The New York Times, "relatively low-information, relatively disengaged," the lack of engagement wasn't a sign that they didn't care. After all, if they truly didn't care, they wouldn't have been planning to vote. The undecided voters I talked to did care about politics, or at least judged it to be important; they just didn't enjoy politics. ...
Most undecided voters ... seem to view politics the way I view laundry. While I understand that to be a functioning member of society I have to do my laundry, and I always eventually get it done, I'll never do it before every last piece of clean clothing is dirty, as I find the entire business to be a chore. A significant number of undecided voters, I think, view politics in exactly this way: as a chore, a duty, something that must be done but is altogether unpleasant, and therefore something best put off for as long as possible.
Obama's gearing up his $1 billion ad campaign (sorry, "2012 Democratic Presidential Reelection effort"), all aimed at these attentive, distinguishing minds. And, sorry to say, like most Democrats, he's aiming at their minds.
Reread that Hayes piece. Would you aim at their minds? The Republicans, should they acquire a real candidate, will aim a touch lower down.
GP
