We all have our ways of dealing with impending deadlines. Judging by his latest column, it appears William Galston is the kind of Democrat who deals with the prospect of a Democratic president winning re-election by laying out all the ways in which said president has run a terrible campaign and consequently will not be able to accomplish much of anything even if he wins on Tuesday. It is yet another contribution by Galston to the false-equivalence meme that continues to afflict so many Washington “wise men”.
“I cannot remember an election in which the gap was greater between the magnitude of our problems and the substance of our politics.” That’s odd because as a veteran of the Clinton administration, I’m pretty sure Galston remembers the 2000 presidential election in which Al Gore’s heavy sighing at George W. Bush’s repeated lies in the first debate mattered more than, say, the growing threat from al-Qaeda.
“With rare exceptions, Mitt Romney has alternated vacuity and self-contradiction, with interludes of fuzzy math. Regrettably, Barack Obama has done little better.” Well, if Galston considers Pres. Obama’s refusal to take refuge in “fuzzy math”, the striking consistency of his issue agenda over the past one (or four or twelve) year period, and his willingness to take difficult, risky and unpopular actions (e.g., the Recovery Act, Obamacare, going after Osama bin Laden) to be “little better” than Romney’s behavior, then that’s his prerogative. He just shouldn’t be surprised when most Democrats disagree.
“After the debt ceiling fiasco in the summer of last year, Obama and his political team all but abandoned governing and subordinated everything to the imperatives of winning the 2012 election.” This is the same Pres. Obama who returned to Washington last fall with an American Jobs Act comprised solely of initiatives that had proven track records of bipartisan support and that, if passed, would have created over 1 million new jobs. As Galston no doubt recalls, it failed to pass because Republicans—consistent with their four year strategy of opposing anything Obama proposed—blocked it.
And, as Galston himself writes later in the same paragraph, “The president systematically used the bully pulpit and his executive authority…. For young people, lower rates on student loans. For Latinos, announce a non-legislative version of the Dream Act. For gays and lesbians, endorse same-sex marriage. For single women, pick a fight over contraception with the Catholic Church and run a national convention in which the centrality of abortion rights startled even seasoned observers.” Many fair-minded observers might point out to Galston that those are actions of a president who has continued governing despite the obstacles in his path. (Also, if Galston is trying to make the case that Pres. Obama “abandoned governing”, it’s best not to include multiple examples of the president’s persistence in governing in the same paragraph.)
Given the likelihood of Republicans maintaining control of the House, Galston notes dourly, “… as has been the case since November of 2010, the president’s post-election choices reduce to two–compromise or gridlock.” This is, of course, true for any president (Bush in 2007, Clinton in 1995, Bush in 1989, Reagan in 1987) facing a Congress in which the opposition party controls at least one house. It’s also true regardless of what kind of election campaign a president has run.
Stunningly, Galston concludes by talking about the “fiscal cliff”—“not only sequestration and the Bush tax cuts, but also the alternative minimum tax, Medicare payments to doctors, and much else“—as if it is a great and immediate peril to the 2nd Obama administration. As Jonathan Chait noted in New York magazine last month, the opposite is true. If Jan. 1 comes and goes without any action taken on Capitol Hill, Pres. Obama and the rest of us will wake up in a country whose fiscal problems have effectively been solved at the risk of a mild recession coming at the best possible political moment for a newly re-elected president.
Chait writes, “Obama has spent the last two years surrendering short-term policy concessions, he has been quietly hoarding a fortune in the equivalent of a political trust fund that comes due on the first of the year. At that point, he will reside in a political world he finds at most mildly uncomfortable and the Republicans consider a hellish dystopia.”
The so-called “fiscal cliff” is a more of a fiscal slope, in which the expiration of the Bush (and other) tax cuts combines with the Republican-created sequestration of nearly $100 billion in federal spending (half from the Pentagon) to create more deficit reduction more rapidly than so-called “deficit hawks” like Galston now want. (St. Augustine’s prayer that God grant him chastity “but not yet” comes to mind.)
“Given the polarization between the parties, getting to yes anytime in the next few years will require a series of hard compromises.” Actually, no, it doesn’t. The hard compromises—extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, deciding to sequester funds if Congress couldn’t agree to reduce spending last year—have already been made and are ready to go into effect. If congressional Republicans want to make a different set of compromises, I’m reasonably confident that Pres. Obama and congressional Democrats are willing to consider any serious proposal.
“The alternative to compromise is a continuation of confidence-sapping drift and slow national decline.” It’s just as—if not more—likely that a refusal by congressional Republicans to compromise with their Democratic counterparts and with a newly-reelected Pres. Obama would act like a cold slap in the face to the Republican strategy of intransigence and obstructionism. Republicans would likely bear the brunt of the blame for raising taxes on all Americans while simultaneously “weakening the nation’s defenses”.
If Republicans continued to remain united and defiant, there’s another debt ceiling vote coming up in February or March. If they refuse to raise the debt ceiling, I’d guess odds are better than even that Pres. Obama would either shut down the government or exercise the “constitutional option” that says a Congress that has authorized spending has no power to stop the federal government from paying the nation’s legally acquired debts.
“Obama isn’t solely to blame for this, of course, but the way he chose to run for reelection has made a bad situation worse.” It’s extraordinarily kind of Galston to extend himself and acknowledge that “Obama isn’t solely to blame”. Perhaps someday Galston will even reach the point of being willing to acknowledge that Obama isn’t primarily to blame at all. The lion’s share of the blame, in fact, rests with the monumentally mendacious Mitt Romney and the Republican Party that he leads.
For someone who considers himself a reasonable left-of-center Democrat, Galston sure has a funny way of demonstrating it. The longer Washington pundits like Galston continue providing cover for the extremist, obstructionist culture that dominates today’s Republican Party, the longer it will take to reach that blessed day of bipartisan compromise for the good of the nation.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/