Robert Reich is an incredibly smart man whose politics pretty much mirror my own, but he’s got the same liberal myopia that I see from friends and colleagues throughout the blogosphere and the activist community. He wants to know, for example, why we’re stuck debating the debt ceiling, deficits, and debt when we have persistently high unemployment, low economic growth, and increasing income disparity. Here’s how he explains it to himself:
Part of the answer is a Republican Party that’s the most irresponsible and rigidly ideological I’ve ever witnessed.
Part of the answer is the continuing gravitational pull of the Great Recession.
But another part of the answer lies with the president — and his inability or unwillingness to use the bully pulpit to tell Americans the truth, and mobilize them for what must be done.
This is the “lack of leadership’ argument. The premise of which is that the president can use the bully pulpit to educate and mobilize the public so that they can influence Congress and push them to support the president’s agenda. He can provide cover for his vulnerable members and he can scare or cajole his opponents into cooperation or capitulation.
Another variety of this argument puts the onus on the people…FDR’s admonition that organizers “make him to do something” by creating public demand for it. This latter argument is more realistic and useful than the first.
Let’s look at where we stand this weekend. As soon as the ink was dry from the 2010 midterm elections it was clear that we would be seeing something never seen before. We would be seeing a link between raising the debt ceiling and cutting the deficit dramatically. I believe MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell discussed this on the air on election night, or within days of it anyway. So many new members had pledged to make this link that it was inevitable that the link would be made.
How did the president respond? At first he made the obvious argument that such a linkage had never been made before and should not be made now. But it wasn’t something the Republicans could be deterred from doing by mere rhetoric. In fact, raising the debt ceiling polls very poorly and educating the public about it would entail a months-long effort to justify the government’s inability to live within its means. The president’s mission wouldn’t be merely to improve those poll numbers to parity, but to convince an overwhelming number of people so that immense pressure would be placed on Republicans serving in conservative districts to abandon their linkage. This would have been an impossible task, even if his own party remained united behind him. But they wouldn’t have remained united; increasingly they would have become divided.
As should be obvious by now, the new Speaker of the House never had the votes to pass a clean hike in the debt ceiling. He never had the votes to pass any reasonable or acceptable or even sane hike in the debt ceiling. And this wasn’t any great secret. By no later than early spring it was clear that decoupling was impossible and that some deal must be struck. It was also clear before long that the Speaker couldn’t deliver any fair or reasonable deal. What I’m saying here is that our present situation was not avoidable. We should not be debating why we’re debating the debt ceiling. We’re debating it because we lost the 2010 midterms, badly, to a bunch of fire-breathing debt-crusaders. It’s fair to place some blame on the president for those midterm losses, but we have to keep things in context.
It was probably around the time that the president became firmly convinced that what we’re facing this weekend was unavoidable that he did something to protect himself politically. He offered to accept linkage but make it contingent on a Grand Bargain that would involve sacrifices on all sides. He put Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid on the table and asked the Republicans to reciprocate with a willingness to cut tax loopholes on private jet owners and Big Oil companies. As he suspected, and as was soon confirmed for him, the answer to all concessions was no.
He crafted his proposal so that he would get some tangible benefits if the Republicans unexpectedly agreed to cooperate. He would get an extension of unemployment insurance. He would backload the cuts to protect this year’s and next year’s budget, he’d get an extension past next election day, and he’d get tax revenues. But these things just made it less likely that the Republicans would agree to a Grand Bargain.
The president did use his bully pulpit to talk about fairness in the tax code and shared sacrifice. He did talk about protecting the most important investments, like education, research, and clean energy. But, what he didn’t do is talk about the need to stimulate the economy with new government spending. He gave up on Keynesian economics completely and even began making arguments against those principles, like saying that “in tough times the government needs to tighten its belt.” On this last bit, the president can be rightly criticized for triangulation. There wasn’t much point in asking for more money or in complaining about not getting it, but he didn’t need to push an anti-Keynesian argument.
Yet, the central reality presented by the Midterms’ outcome was that the president would not be able to help the economy by injecting money into it through congressional appropriations. He was wise to recognize that reality rather than to fight it.
Given the battleground he faced this year, the best he could do is to protect the recovery by backloading as much of the cuts as he could, getting an extension of unemployment insurance, and getting the debt ceiling debate off the table until after the election. Even those limited goals would have to be extracted at a staggering cost, if they could be extracted at all. So, much of the planning was political. How could he win the public debate over who was responsible for the debt ceiling crisis? How could he keep Democrats united and Republicans divided?
The answer to that was to be willing to compromise while the Republicans refused to do so. This was easy to do considering the Republicans refusal, even inability, to make concessions. To be sure, the president has taken a hit in the polls. His willingness to compromise hurts his standing with his base and makes him look weak. Meanwhile, dysfunction in DC has hurt the poll numbers of all politicians. But, comparatively, the president has done better than anyone else, and his party has largely won the argument.
For every Robert Reich who is carping on the left, there are a dozen unhappy Republicans who think the GOP is acting recklessly. John Boehner’s speakership is in ashes. Michele Bachmann in now polling about evenly with Mitt Romney. The GOP is having a huge internal fight and is loathed and mistrusted by the entire international community. They have been exposed for the radicals that they are, and the people disagree overwhelmingly with their behavior and their approach.
It could have been different. The president could have refused to accept any coupling of the debt ceiling to budget cuts. He could have, rather, argued he needed more money to stimulate the economy. He could have tried to convince people of that. But, in that case, we’d still be here this weekend facing default. And we’d be the party divided and unpopular. Obama, not Boehner, would be the one whose career was a smoking husk. And the people would be blaming the Democrats for their intransigence, instead of the other way around.
The truth is, the 2010 midterms were a catastrophe. They had horrible consequences. This weekend was one of those consequences, and it couldn’t be avoided through “leadership.”
