We’ve spent a lot of time trying to unearth “the real Mitt Romney.” What does he stand for? What positions are merely for convenience and what positions are non-negotiable? Will he govern more like a Massachusetts governor facing an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, or the more-conservative-than-thou candidate we saw in the primaries? And how much freedom does he have to choose?
We don’t even know if Romney will be a realist or a neo-conservative in his foreign policy. His word counts for nothing. But there is one area where he is going to have to reveal himself. He is going to have to take sides on a government shutdown in September. The White House has now guaranteed this.
I try to avoid writing about the budget both because I’m not that good at it and because it’s obviously quite boring. But the budget is going to wind up being the biggest domestic issue in this campaign. Let me try to explain. In the big picture, the dispute about the budget is really a proxy for two diametrically-opposed visions of the federal government and what it should do. Romney isn’t the driver of this vision. He just wound up in the ship’s cabin at this particular point in history. And this point in history is the high-water mark for the modern conservative movement. The Republican Party has been completely taken over by conservatives and they have more power in Congress than in any time in our nation’s history. They will either win this election and begin to implement their radical revision of the New Deal and post-war consensus, or they will lose this election and see their numbers recede as demographic changes force the party to moderate. So, yes, the stakes are really big.
That’s the wide-angle view. The narrow-angle view is a lot more specific.
In a major escalation of a slowly building fight over funding the government, the White House has warned House Republicans, in no uncertain terms, that the government will shut down in September if the GOP does not adhere to an agreement they cut with Democrats in August during the standoff over raising the nation’s debt limit.
“Until the House of Representatives indicates that it will abide by last summer’s agreement, the President will not be able to sign any appropriations bills,” writes Jeffrey Zients, acting director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, in a letter addressed to congressional appropriators Wednesday.
You can read the full letter here.
Now, there are two major components to this. The first is that the president is arguing for the merits of the agreement he made with the Republicans. He’s saying that the budget deal was good because it cuts $2 trillion in debt from the budget while creating the right balance between military and domestic spending cuts. It makes needed investments in education, research, and infrastructure. He’s saying that the deal is acceptable and that it keeps the government at an appropriate size while acknowledging the need to downsize somewhat. So, that’s the argument about what the federal government should do.
The second component is about the fact that the Republicans are reneging on a deal they made. They aren’t honoring their word. They’re going back on what they agreed to. They’re acting in bad faith.
A person can disagree with the president about the appropriate size of government and still think that the Republicans should honor their commitments and keep their promises. If you want to shrink the government more, then go and win the election. But don’t shut down the government after you promised to keep it open.
It’s this second component of the disagreement that really gives the president the upper hand. And it complicates things greatly for Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney is going to have to make a choice. Is the president right that the Republicans made a deal and should keep it? Does he want to defend a government shutdown in September that is a direct result of broken promises? After all, he can set the size of government next year if he’s elected. There’s no need to have this battle 60 days before the people vote.
If Romney sides with the president, he will sell out the conservatives who have banded together to force John Boehner to go back on the budget deal. And, since Boehner is pretending that he’s doing exactly what he wants to do, Romney would be selling out the Speaker, too.
If, on the other hand, Romney sticks with the Republican position, he’ll be pushed far out on a limb.
This isn’t so much brilliant strategy by the Obama team as it is blundering insanity by the Republicans. The president wants to run against Congress. What better way to do that than to have a fight about a government shutdown in September? The president wants to force Romney to reveal himself. What better way to do that than to force him to choose between backing a bad-faith move and alienating his entire party?
The GOP set itself up for this. It’s a result of John Boehner’s staggering weakness. Can Romney corral the unruly conservatives when Boehner couldn’t?
So, we will have this fight. We will fight over the appropriate role and size of the federal government, and we will fight over whether a political party should negotiate in bad-faith and break its word.
And I think we can win this argument on both fronts. And I think the Republicans could be setting themselves up for losses in Congress that are far bigger than anyone is imagining to be possible right now.
Good post, Boo. You call Boehner weak, and I suppose he is, but I’ve a hunch anyone serving as Speaker in this Congress would find himself in a weak position. The Tea Party caucus acts like a separate party in a parliamentary coalition.
yes and no.
As long as Boehner wants to be Speaker of the GOP only, he will be weak. When he decides he wants to be the Speaker of the House, he will be strong.
On issue after issue, he could have cut a deal with the Democrats. He wouldn’t have to do it more than once, either, to teach the conservatives who’s boss. Establish the precedent and then threaten to do it whenever the tea party bloc gets too unruly.
But he doesn’t have the imagination and can’t cultivate the loyalty from the sane members to pull it off.
Can a Speaker be replaced midsession, like in a parliament? I would think Boehner would then need Democratic votes to reaffirm him, in the face of a Cantor-led insurrection if he ever told the Tea Party wing to suck it. At minimum, two-thirds of his caucus is already against him now, simply because Boehner believes the US government has the right to exist and be funded as such.
I also think we can’t underestimate the money Crossroads will put behind ads to blame the President for the shutdown and tying it to the debt debacle. Fortunately, the media and the President’s microphone and the fact POTUS should have enough money to defend himself will suffice.
But this is going to be a dog fight; and the Republicans are on the wrong policy track as well as the wrong foot politically.
They will either win this election and begin to implement their radical revision of the New Deal and post-war consensus, or they will lose this election and see their numbers recede as demographic changes force the party to moderate.
I call bullshit on this. When ever they lose, they always double down. Because we all know what their reaction will be when R-money loses.
I agree. As for what Romney will do? Oppose Obama, no matter what. He doesn’t have the imagination or guts to do anything else.
Oppose McConnell, too?
You’ve caught me in the BS zone, but yes, I think he’ll oppose Obama no matter what anyone else says.
I think you’re right on the most obvious level. Republicans don’t learn to become more moderate simply because they lost an election, or even two in a row (see 2006 and 2008). Their instinct is to become even more conservative.
But what you are probably missing is what they”ll conclude if the Electoral College suddenly looks not just difficult, but unattainable.
They can’t be fighting for Virginia and North Carolina and Arizona and Indiana. If those aren’t safe red states, their chances of winning the presidency go out the window. If Colorado and New Mexico and Nevada and Florida become reliably blue states, they’re screwed.
And before long Texas will be a purple state. Without researching the demographics, I predict Texas will be up for grabs no later than 2024, if not earlier.
We’re at a particular point in history where being the party for old pissed off white guys is still a viable thing. But it won’t be for long. It might not be viable in a general election now, although we saw in 2010 that it can still work quite well in an off-year. Their time is short, Calvin. They will either learn, or they will go back to the party they were from 1933-1968, a pathetic rump.
Just to add the math to Booman’s point. Every year for the next decade, about 4 million people will turn 18. If only half of them vote, and if they only vote Democratic by a 3-2 margin, that’s still an additional margin of 400,000 votes a year nationally for a generic Democrat vs. a generic Republican.
Every four years, it’s an additional 1.6 million vote margin. By 2020, it’s plus 4.8 million votes from the Obama-McCain election.
Now, nothing is that simple in politics. But even though some waves are higher than others, when the tide is rising, anyone on the shoreline will get washed away unless they move to higher ground.
For Republicans, changing so that they no longer appeal almost exclusively to older whiter voters is the “move to higher ground”.
What about the number of older voters who move from the D column to the I or the I to the R column as they increasingly age? Seems overly simplistic to say that a D vote at 18 (even at a 3:2 ratio) isn’t possibly blunted by older voters becoming tax curmudgeons. Otherwise ALL Rs would eventually disappear. What am I missing?
My understanding is that voters tend to maintain their partisan affiliation as they age. (Not completely, but there’s a certain “stickiness”.)
Even if some aging voters move to the right, they’re at least partly offset by older voters who die.
Barring a major upheaval in the American political system, the Republican Party will still be around in 10-20 years.
However, given what’s happening demographically in the country, Republicans face, basically, two alternatives:
1 – stay the course and become a party that dominates small, sparsely populated, overwhelmingly white states.
2 – take active steps to welcome non-white voters and leaders (already happening with folks like Jindal, Martinez, Haley, Rubio, etc.) and become a more racially and ethnically inclusive conservative party that competes for power nationally.
You are right about this, except the comment I excerpted earlier. it brings up one problem no one is talking about. Talking about spending cuts, especially in domestic programs, while the economy is still very weak.
I have a hard time believing that even the Republican Death Cult would annihilate their own party over thirty billion dollars.
Sigh. Which programs are they still looking to zero out this year? Same old same old? Fucking psychos.
Orange Julius is the worst Speaker in modern times.
good post, BooMan.
If there’s a showdown like this in September, I cannot see how the GOP wins. Their ads are likely to be the usual sarcastic, aggressive, negative things that people hate (and which cause me to switch to PBS to watch documentaries about obscure invertebrates). With all that money they’ve got, those ads will pour through every television and radio in the US. Negativity, negativity, etc. Meanwhile, the GOP reps will be shutting down the government, and whining about government spending, when fresh polls have once again reiterated that people (outside the deep south, Idaho, and Wyoming) actually want higher taxes on the rich and don’t want more spending cuts.
Negative campaigning works.
It seems reasonable to think that if there’s another crisis and people get scared, they will look around for answers and reassurance. The Reps trying to shut down the government will not attract such people. The president of the US will. If the GOP goes this route, they will up the volume of Obama’s bully pulpit immeasurably. And I think they’re stupid and desperate enough to do it anyway.Either way, they lose.
The noise from the noisier part of the left was that the budget deal was a big defeat for Obama and the Democrats. Remember that? It was not, and I hope more people can appreciate that now. Obama saw this coming, and he saw that either way (if the GOP kept to the bargain or not), it was a win/win situation.
I’ve got a slightly different take on it. I think there’s no doubt the debt reduction/debt ceiling deal was a loss for Obama and the Democrats.
But Obama’s proved to have a talent for taking a loss in such a way that it sets him up for a bigger win down the road.
He did that with the Afghanistan “surge” when the generals outflanked him, leaving him no real option but to support some kind of major troop increase. What Obama did then was get the generals to agree (publicly) that the “surge” was big enough and that they’d all support a withdrawal starting 18 months later—which they have.
With the debt ceiling deal last summer, Obama won a big enough deal so that the Republicans couldn’t pull the same stunt again before the 2012 election. And he won a “trigger” that protects Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while requiring that half the cuts come from the military. And they come in 2013 (unless there’s a new deal cut before then).
The difference may be more semantic than real. It was a victory in the sense of the effect down the road of things that were agreed to at that time, but not noticed by many people, including most Republicans, who certainly thought it was a victory for them. But then, they think everything they do is a victory for them, don’t they? And, accordingly, most on the left believe them.
I found Leo Soderman’s arguments persuasive at the time.
http://www.editedforclarity.com/2011/08/01/debt-ceiling-deal-the-devil-is-in-the-details/
Here’s another such. same date:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/01/1001645/-3-Big-Victories-for-ObamaDems-in-Debt-Ceiling-Figh
t-%E2%80%93-Republicans-Just-Trying-to-Save-Face
We lost the argument last time (though that is a function partially of GOP numbers already being so low) what’s changed?
It’s a presidential election, which means a larger, younger, more Democratic-leaning electorate. If the economy keeps puttering along, then that will also be different from two years ago.
is let the Republicans bring it right to the brink of shudown – make it clear that they will do that – then offer to cancel the military cuts and offset the budget shortfall with a tax increase on the rich. I prefer it not be letting the Bush tax cuts die, because that is the official status quo, so we should not have to bargain for that. Something like an enhanced Buffer rule. Then let the Repubs shut down the government to keep rich people’s taxes low. In substance, best would be to increase capital gains tax. Asset bubbles mean there is too much investment capital for the economy to absorb, so the government could put that to better use.
Agreed. That would be a win politically, policywise, and morally. I’d go further than you with a substantial tax rate increase on personal incomes over a $million and a clean sweep of corporate exceptions like the fossil fuel subsidies and a long list of tax breaks.
Obama, whether he engineered this or not, has a rare opportunity to move this nation away from the tax-hate, rich-love madness that has infested its political arguments. What’s the bet on whether his ambition for his legacy beats out his instinct against going in for the kill?