Obama is throwing his presidency away with both hands.

seafan

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Sat Jul-23-11 04:20 PM
Original message

Obama is throwing his presidency away with both hands.

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Digby, and many of the rest of us, are on a tear today.

"Compromising Position"

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There's compromise and then there's giving away the store. Even if the Republicans agreed to the revenue in this deal, it could not in any way be seen as shared sacrifice. The cuts are far more onerous to average Americans than whatever "revenue enhancements" they come up with. (This notion of broadening and flattening and lowering rates is a recipe for bullshit, not deficit reduction.)

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That's why the President's liberal critics are mad, not because they don't believe in compromise. They simply don't agree that we should "want to get our fiscal house in order" by cutting SS benefits or raising the Medicare age or throwing a bunch of poor people off the health care rolls while the wealthy are making huge profits and income inequality grows and grows and grows. And we certainly aren't persuaded that once we do that we will be able to pursue all kinds of wonderful programs that require new spending. That's fatuous and frankly, insulting.

There are alternatives out there if deficit reduction is so damned important. The House Democrats' plan, for instance, which I doubt the White House has even bothered to read since they had already offered up half the New Deal before it even came out. There's also the pending expiration of the Bush tax cuts. The fact that their reinstatement alone would substantially solve the problem should tell people something about the cause of the deficit. I realize that nobody wants to raise any taxes, ever, but nobody's even tried to make the argument for doing it to solve the deficit so we don't have any clue how it would come out.

And in any case, the deficit issue itself is a disaster capitalist construct designed to confuse people into thinking that this is the cause of their problems when it is actually a symptom of a larger one that nobody wants to deal with. Even engaging in it at this point it is a capitulation to magical thinking and up-is-downism along the lines of the Iraq war debate. It seems this is what we do now (on a totally bipartisan basis, so that's nice): we make our serious problems worse by putting all our energies into "solving" those that are irrelevant.(And botching even that.) It's the sign of a totally dysfunctional system led by people who either don't know or don't care enough to fix it. It's monumentally depressing.

Krugman:

Jonathan Cohn summarizes what seems to have been in the deal that Boehner walked away from; it’s horrifying. Above all, the proposed rise in the age of Medicare eligibility was a real betrayal of both Democratic principles and good government.

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But it’s quite something else to take people who are currently being covered by a rational single-payer system, and force them back into the inefficient, parasitic world of private insurance. That’s terrible. And it’s also politically stupid: if you think for a minute that Republicans wouldn’t turn right around and run ads about how Obama is taking away your Medicare, you’ve been living under a rock.

Oh, and of course, Republicans were also trying to undermine health reform; so seniors would find themselves thrown off Medicare but, in many cases, unable to get private insurance either.

Great work, White House.

Robert Reich:

Why Medicare Is the Solution — Not the Problem:

Not only is Social Security on the chopping block in order to respond to Republican extortion. So is Medicare.

But Medicare isn’t the nation’s budgetary problems. It’s the solution. The real problem is the soaring costs of health care that lie beneath Medicare. They’re costs all of us are bearing in the form of soaring premiums, co-payments, and deductibles.

Medicare offers a means of reducing these costs — if Washington would let it.

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Reich again:

The Only Social Security Reform Worth Considering: Raising the Ceiling on Income Subject to It

The very idea that Social Security might be on the chopping block in order to pay the ransom Republicans are demanding reveals both the cravenness of their demands and the callowness of the opposition to those demands.

In a former life I was a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. So let me set the record straight.

Social Security isn’t responsible for the federal deficit. Just the opposite. Until last year Social Security took in more payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits. It lent the surpluses to the rest of the government.

Now that Social Security has started to pay out more than it takes in, Social Security can simply collect what the rest of the government owes it. This will keep it fully solvent for the next 26 years.

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Glenn Greenwald:

Barack Obama is gutting the core principles of the Democratic party

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Where is the "epic shitstorm" from the left which (Duncan "Atrios") Black predicted? With a few exceptions – the liberal blog FiredogLake has assembled 50,000 Obama supporters vowing to withhold re-election support if he follows through, and a few other groups have begun organising as well – it's nowhere to be found.

Therein lies one of the most enduring attributes of Obama's legacy: in many crucial areas, he has done more to subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses – even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.

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And now he is devoting all of his presidential power to cutting the entitlement programmes that have been the defining hallmark of the Democratic party since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The silence from progressive partisans is (deafening) – and depressing, though sadly predictable.

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..... Obama is now on the verge of injecting what until recently was the politically toxic and unattainable dream of Wall Street and the American right – attacks on the nation's social safety net – into the heart and soul of the Democratic party's platform. Those progressives who are guided more by party loyalty than actual belief will seamlessly transform from virulent opponents of such cuts into their primary defenders.

And thus will Obama succeed – yet again – in gutting not only core Democratic policies, but also the identity and power of the American Left.

No matter what happens from this point forward, because Obama so cavalierly thrust Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid upon the table as a "Grand Sacrifice" to carnivorous Republicans, thus offering up the very bedrock principles that courageous Democrats created decades ago to protect the old, the sick, the disabled and the poor, this president has sealed his own fate.

Now, there is no turning back, for this presidency is finished.