I agree with Greg Sargent and I’ll go one further. I don’t even find the president’s effort to get a little political advantage out of his brushback of the ‘purist left’ to be an annoyance. If you had to read my email you’d be pretty ready to throw some beanballs at some lefties, too. How else do you respond to otherwise smart and principled people who think it’s a good idea to run Alan Grayson or Donna Edwards as serious alternatives to the president in the 2012 election? For every email I read about Republican obstruction, I read thirty about what a sell-out or disappointment or closet-Republican the president turned out to be. Everyone fancies themselves an economist these days, too. It’s kind of a viral thing. So, for example, it used to be that progressives thought a payroll tax holiday was an awesome idea, provided that the holiday only applied to the employee-contribution. But now that the president has won that stimulative concession from the Republicans, it is a secret plot to defund Social Security. Trust me, you can find this allegation anywhere you look in the blogosphere. Who came up with it first? I don’t know, but it wasn’t someone who is used to giving the president the benefit of the doubt.
In any case, we have to have this conversation because it is going to keep coming up. Triangulation isn’t merely positioning yourself between the two parties, although that is part of it. Triangulation is adopting your opponents’ goals as your own, passing versions of their priorities that are maybe a little less egregious than they could be, and then going out and taking credit for passing your opponents’ agenda. So, Bill Clinton was happy to tell everyone that he reformed welfare, ended big government, and balanced the budget. None of those things were why Clinton won the nomination or the presidency. Clinton basically passed Ross Perot’s agenda and then called it his own. That is not what President Obama is doing. He’s dissing the left for the reason that Sargent says he’s dissing the left.
The reason Obama’s attacks on the left smack of triangulation is that he persists on painting the left and the right with the same brush: He presents himself as the last reasonable man trapped between two sides blinded to reason by ideology. Hence his insistence yesterday that he won’t be held to any unreasonable “ideal.” But as irksom as this is, it isn’t really the same as positioning oneself ideologically by arguing that the left is wrong on policy substance, as Bill Clinton did.
Obama’s argument with the left, at bottom, is more a dispute over what’s achievable, and less an argument over what is desirable to achieve. Obama opposes extending the high end tax cuts, just as the left does. His disagreement with the left is over whether there’s another way to achieve the goals Obama and the left agree on: Extending the middle class cuts and extending unemployment benefits. The left says a protracted fight would achieve those things. Obama and his advisers say a fight wouldn’t achieve those things, or at least that a fight wouldn’t achieve them in time to stave off a tax hike for the middle class. Hence his willingness to reach a deal.
Indeed, Obama’s outburst yesterday was rooted in genuine frustration with the left for not agreeing with him about what’s possible given today’s political realities.
Yeah, pretty much.
