I believe in standing for something but I don’t believe in proving your impotence just to make yourself feel better about getting rolled. It was almost comical watching progressive organizations try to oppose the president’s deal with the Republicans. Obama didn’t have to break a sweat:
Other Democrats predicted the tax plan would be passed as is on Thursday, making clear that their initial fury at the prospect of extending Bush-era tax rates even on the highest incomes had given way to acceptance that the White House, its leverage weakened by midterm election losses, had negotiated the best compromise it could.
While House Democratic leaders have not pressured their members on the legislation, Obama has been calling rank-and-file lawmakers to argue for passage. A leading critic, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), said on CNN Wednesday that Obama has been telling lawmakers it would be “the end of his presidency” if the bill fails.
I don’t like the bill, but I could tell you that it was going to pass. As I said after the deal was announced, the most progressives could hope to do is to tinker with the Estate Tax a bit. I encourage the House to go ahead and do that and force the Senate to deal with them in Conference. But I doubt they will for the simple reason that they don’t have enough time to do that without it costing them something more important, like a vote on the New START Treaty or the repeal of DADT or something else. One thing I keep saying that seems to gain little currency is that the Party of No Strategy deserves a lot of credit for watering down our agenda, demoralizing our base, forcing us into painful tradeoffs that pit our supporters against each other, firing up the Republican base, and doing real damage to the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. The strategy has worked marvelously well in all these aims and also in avoiding blame from the media or even from us. We prefer to blame our leaders and ourselves and the intelligence of the people and the media and campaign finance laws and so on. But we are very reluctant to give any credit to the opposition for manipulating us and frustrating us and making us divided and demoralized.
I’ll keep giving them credit and asking people to take a step back and make sure they’re not acting like puppets on Mitch McConnell’s string. I remind you that this has been the most productive and progressive Congress since the mid-1960’s and this has been the most successful and productive administration since Eisenhower was in office. Yeah, maybe that doesn’t count for much when the competition involves a guy who was shot and killed, a guy who gave us the Vietnam War, a guy who was impeached and resigned, a guy who couldn’t fix the economy or get our hostages released, a guy who was embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, a guy who was impeached and acquitted, and two guys named Bush. So, yeah, our leadership has sucked for as long as anyone can remember. Our Congress is broken. Our budget is broken. Our foreign policy is broken. Our moral compass is on the fritz. It says something that we’ve never had it so good and we’re still so unhappy.
But I have some perspective. I don’t like having it proved to me everyday that our system sucks. But I am not disappointed. We had a great two years. It should have been a lot better, but we did well. We’ll be longing to have it this good for a long, long time. It should become clear shortly what we’re really facing and who is prepared to fight the real enemy. I wish it had been clear all along.
