Walter Mondale’s old speechwriter Charles Krauthammer basically gets what Obama is up to, even if he casts everything in his typically hyper-partisan way.
Upon losing the House in 2010, the leveler took cover for the next two years. He wasn’t going to advance his real agenda through the Republican House anyway, and he needed to win reelection.
Now he’s won. The old Obama is back. He must not be underestimated. He has deftly leveraged his class-war-themed election victory (a) to secure a source of funding (albeit still small) for the bloated welfare state, (b) to carry out an admirably candid bit of income redistribution and (c) to fracture the one remaining institutional obstacle to the rest of his ideological agenda.
Not bad for two months’ work.
It seems strange to cast this as some sinister and hidden plot. Democrats do not want to dismantle the New Deal, and it must be financed. From that perspective, the Republicans actually didn’t do too badly in the fiscal cliff negotiations. Obama only received half of the revenues he was seeking, and what he was seeking was grossly inadequate to finance the continued upkeep of our New Deal and Great Society programs. The Beast is still being starved.
Yet, Krauthammer is correct about what Obama accomplished. He’s right that the American people are behind Obama and that Obama is only doing what he said he would do during the campaign…which he won. He’s also wrong to focus so heavily on tax rates and revenues. Most of Obama’s upcoming agenda has nothing to do with tax rates and revenues. He wants comprehensive immigration reform and an assault weapons ban and infrastructure spending and education reform and work on climate change. Yes, tax reform in on the agenda, too, but that is only one part of what Obama hopes to accomplish. Fracturing the “one remaining institutional obstacle to the rest of his ideological agenda” was an absolute prerequisite for him if he is going to get anything done. That was the point I made repeatedly in the run-up to the fiscal cliff. It is why I saw a deal passed with mostly Democratic votes (in the House) to be worth much more than it might look like on paper. That fracture must be maintained.
