For those of you who don’t know anything about Elizabeth Drew, she is a former political correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. She currently provides political commentary for The New York Review of Books. A journalist, she is also an author of 14 books herself, and a Washington resident. Her most recent article “What Were They Thinking?” provides a great deal of insight into how we find ourselves in another fine mess. If you can’t read the entire article (small print, lots of words) let me provide you with a few choice excerpts:
Someday people will look back and wonder, What were they thinking? Why, in the midst of a stalled recovery, with the economy fragile and job creation slowing to a trickle, did the nation’s leaders decide that the thing to do—in order to raise the debt limit, normally a routine matter—was to spend less money, making job creation all the more difficult? […]
… The Republicans had made it clear for months that they would use the need to raise the debt ceiling as an instrument for extracting concessions from the Democratic President in the form of more cuts in federal programs. […]
Boehner hadn’t realized at first that he’d have so many Republican defectors—fifty-four—who voted against the continuing resolution he’d negotiated with Obama in early April, on the ground that it didn’t cut spending enough, though Boehner had, in effect, taken Obama to the cleaners. This established in both Democrats’ and Republicans’ minds the thought that Obama was a weak negotiator—a “pushover.” He was more widely seen among Democrats and other close observers as having a strategy of starting near where he thinks the Republicans are—at the fifty-yard line—and then moving closer to their position. […]
Finding a solution to reducing the deficit that was agreeable to Boehner, to Cantor, to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and to the President was no small task. The men, who had rudely and unwisely excluded Pelosi, now the minority leader, from their deliberations, could no longer avoid dealing with her. […]
In early July, when Obama suddenly injected Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid into the deficit and debt negotiations, many, perhaps most, Democrats were dismayed. They believed that the President was offering up the poor and the needy as a negotiating gambit. (His position was that if the Republicans would give on taxes, he’d give on entitlements.) A bewildered Pelosi said after that meeting, “He calls this a Grand Bargain?” And she came down firmly against any changes in those programs that would hurt beneficiaries.
Drew goers on to rightly point out that the Democrats in the House were furious because they believed Paul Ryan had handed them to keys to victory in 2012 with his “bizarre proposal, that would turn Medicare into a voucher system.” They couldn’t understand Obama’s willingness to promote benefit cuts in exchange for modest revenue increases that the Tea Party caucus in the House was simply never going to approve. As she rightly noted, whether out of principle or fear of becoming the next Bob Bennett, the three-term and very Conservative Republican Senator from Utah who lost in a primary to a Tea party candidate in 2010. The fact that Bennett’s seat wasn’t safe from extremist Republican primary voters caused the the old line conservatives in Congress a great deal of angst. After Bennett, not one of them wanted to be seen by the tea party mob as insufficiently aligned with the extremist Tea Party agenda, which called for more tax cuts and more spending cuts, including entitlement reform.
Yet as Larry Summers (hardly the most liberal economic adviser this country has ever had) pointed out, the problem we have is not with federal spending but insufficient demand to sustain an economic recovery and create jobs. Perhaps his conversion to the reality came too late (after he’d already left the administration) but it’s damning nonetheless. Particularly because the President and his political advisers (according to Drew’s sources) decided that reason the Democrats lost the 2010 election was because Obama didn’t come across to Independent voters as being enough of a deficit hawk. The high jobless rate and the fear that Republicans had generated in seniors (always a higher percentage of voters in off-year elections) that Obama and the Dems were trying to destroy Medicare with the Health Care Reform Act was dismissed or ignored.
It all goes back to the “shellacking” Obama took in the 2010 elections. The President’s political advisers studied the numbers and concluded that the voters wanted the government to spend less. This was an arguable interpretation. Nevertheless, the political advisers believed that elections are decided by middle-of-the-road independent voters, and this group became the target for determining the policies of the next two years.
That explains a lot about the course the President has been taking this year. The political team’s reading of these voters was that to them, a dollar spent by government to create a job is a dollar wasted. The only thing that carries weight with such swing voters, they decided—in another arguable proposition—is cutting spending.
Drew points to Obama’s speech on April 13 as the moment when Obama discarded any notion that he would push for job creation through more stimulus spending, and instead veered to the right, seeking to portray himself as a “fiscal conservative” in line with the advice he received from his political team:
In that speech he stated that he wanted to reduce the debt by $4 trillion—thus aligning himself with the Republicans—but also asked for revenues to partly offset that reduction. It was all about reelection politics, designed to appeal to this same group of independents. “And that’s why,” I was told by the person familiar with the White House deliberations, “he went bigger in the deficit reduction talks; bringing in Social Security is consistent with that slice of the electorate they’re trying to reach.” This person said, “There’s a bit of bass-ackwardness to this; the deficit spending you’d want to focus on right now is the jobs issue.”
This all fits with another development in the Obama White House. According to another close observer, David Plouffe, the manager of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, who officially joined the White House staff in January 2011, has taken over. “Everything is about the reelect,” this observer says—”where the President goes, what he does.”
In effect, Drew claims that her sources show why Obama has become a deficit hawk. Obama has adopted the strategy of spending cuts, even to the safety net, because that’s what David Plouffe told him to do if he wants to get re-elected. It’s why Obama has made a concerted effort to give the impression to the public that he is “the most reasonable person in the room.” It’s all about appealing to “independents” even of that means disregarding the anger and concern of much of the base of the Democratic party regarding the proposals he has made, proposals for cuts to entitlements that no other Democratic President has ever made before since Social Security was established.
Because of the extent to which the President had allowed the Republicans to set the terms of the debate, the attitude of numerous congressional Democrats toward him became increasingly sour, even disrespectful. After Obama introduced popular entitlement programs into the budget fight, a Democratic senator described the attitude of a number of his colleagues as:
Resigned disgust at the White House: there they go again. “Mr. Halfway” keeps getting maneuvered around as Republicans move the goalposts on him.
According to a report in The Hill newspaper in late June, the tough-minded, experienced, and blunt Democratic Representative Henry Waxman of California told Obama in a White House meeting that he’d asked several Republicans about their meeting with him the day before, and, “To a person, they said the President’s going to cave.” Then the congressman said to the President of the United States, “And if you’re going to cave, tell us right now.” The President was reported to have been displeased, and responded, “I’m the President of the United States; my words carry weight.”
There’s that word again: Cave. But this time it’s not the word used by disgruntled progressive bloggers. These are the words and opinions of professional Democratic politicians in the Senate and the House.
Now, to be fair, we are in this situation primarily because the Republicans are dogmatic to the point of insanity (or unwilling to challenge that dogma). They bear the greatest portion of blame for this “crisis” because of their adherence to an economic cult and political ideology grounded in selfishness, unfettered and unregulated capitalism and the destruction of the Federal Government. Their policies have been proven over the last thirty years to be utter failures at creating jobs and improving the economic well being of all but a tiny percentage of very well off Americans.
However, as Drew’s reporting shows, Obama own actions this year have often enabled the worst and most cynical among the Republicans to give no quarter in negotiations. It has also fed their delusions and megalomania. At the same time, the President’s failure to consult and work with the leaders of his own party on a strategy to combat the republicans has placed him at odds with senior leaders of his party to his detriment, the detriment of his party and quite possibly the severe detriment of millions of Americans who will suffer whether “a deal” (which I predict will have spending cuts but no revenue increases) is reached before August 2nd or not.
