I agree with Scott Lemieux’s take on how the Obama administration handled negotiations over Social Security during the heyday of the Grand Bargain negotiations, although I am not so sure that I concur with his assessment of the political downside:
Until 2014, Obama’s budget proposals included an offer to reduce the growth of Social Security benefits by changing how the cost-of-living increase is calculated, in exchange for a deal including upper-class tax cuts. Obama, in other words, has not only dropped even contingent proposed cuts, but is also calling for an expansion of benefits. This is a big deal.
Admittedly, on a substantive level, it isn’t much different from his previous position. Tying “chained-CPI” Social Security cuts to upper-class tax cuts no Republican Congress was ever going to pass was an indication that Obama was not actually trying to cut Social Security. The idea was to propose “entitlement reforms” that Beltway journalists tend to love in a form that would ensure Republican rejection. I happen to think this was dumb politics—no special effort is required to make the Republican conference look rejectionist, and being even theoretically open to such cuts weakens the Democratic brand and diminishes the ability of Democrats to attack Republicans for going to war on Social Security. But there’s no reason to believe Obama had any particular commitment to cutting Social Security.
I get that there was some brand damage and lost opportunities to attack Republicans that resulted from pretending to be serious about using Social Security cuts to address the debt, but I think they were outweighed by Obama’s ability to say that he was bending over backwards, defying his base, and acting like the only adult in the room, and the Republicans simply would not reciprocate in any reasonable way.
You have to look at the alternatives available to Obama. He could have taken a maximalist oppositional stance, and rather than putting some concessions on the table simply upped the ante by saying that not only wasn’t the debt a problem, but that we needed to spend more on entitlements. But that would have come with a lot of political costs, and costs that could have imperiled his reelection. For starters, as Lemieux notes, the political media “tend to love” entitlement cuts, so defying them and going aggressively in the opposite direction would have riled them up and caused them to accuse the president of a lack of seriousness and an overly ideological bent. This would have mattered when the debate between Democrats and Republicans was being arbitrated in the press, and the distinction between the president’s openness to negotiations and the Republicans’ refusal to take ‘yes’ for an answer would have been lost.
It’s also easy to forget the political climate back then. After the rise of the Tea Party revolt and the 2010 midterm “shellacking” that the Democrats received, it wasn’t an easy sell to suggest that the Republicans had no mandate to demand cuts in spending. The president needed to acknowledge is some visible way that he had received the message and would work with the Congress the American people had foisted on him. Given his position back then, what better way was there to proceed than to offer the Republicans a deal that they ought to have gladly accepted, knowing all the while that they would never accept it?
That seemed a better play than bunkering down and acting defiant.
Yes, it angered the base and muddied the waters a bit, but it also quite possibly saved Obama’s presidency. And, in retrospect, the cost was minimal.
After all, the president is now making the same case that people wanted him to make back then. And, despite some earlier hesitancy, so is Hillary Clinton.
Spending cuts in exchange for upper class tax cuts that Republicans would never approve?
Does Scott Lemieux have an editor? That’s an error large enough to roll Chris Christie through.
I think you know what he meant.
This doesn’t just beg the question, it begs the entire gap between two factions of the American left. If you presume that ‘being the adult’ works magic on media, which then works magic on the electorate, being the adult must’ve worked better’n the alternative. If not, not. Is pretending to agree to concessions a wiser long-term strategy than proclaiming principles? Is there any way to tell for sure?
Who’s right? Who knows?
Shit. Lost half of my post somehow.
For starters, as Lemieux notes, the political media “tend to love” entitlement cuts, so defying them and going aggressively in the opposite direction would have riled them up and–as Trump proves–caused an upsurge in political support for Obama. This would have mattered when the debate between Democrats and Republicans was being arbitrated in the press, and the distinction between the president’s strength and resolve, and the Republicans’ refusal to govern, would have been lost.
I think it just reinforced the suspicion that only a Democratic President would manage to kill Social Security. The Wall Street favoritism over homeowners already had hackles up.
As I slowly get poorer and poorer I keep telling myself to be a grownup.
It really depends on whether they inaugurate a neoliberal solution when they address basic increases…
How to kill Social Security in 2 easy steps
Here’s Kevin Drum advocating for step 1:
the best way to address retirement security is to continue reforming 401(k) plans and to expand Social Security–but only for low-income workers. Middle-class workers are generally doing reasonably well, and certainly as well as they did in the past. We don’t need a massive and expensive expansion of Social Security for everyone, but we do need to make Social Security more generous for the bottom quarter or so of the population that’s doing poorly in both relative and absolute terms. This is something that every liberal ought to support, and hopefully this is the bandwagon that President Obama in now on.
Step 2:
Now that 3/4 of the population will be paying into a system to transfer their income to the bottom 1/4, you have instantly created a majority constituency that will benefit from killing the now-welfare program.
Oops, courtesy of New Deal Democrat
I’m missing the logic there. 75% of people will receive the same level os SS benefits. but they’ll push congress to completely eliminate their own benefits because the poor get more?
Francis Perkins knew what she was doing…
Generally speaking, it’s not a good idea to follow an illogical comment with a nonsensical response.
Since you seem to be ahistorical on the subject…
Bruce Webb said in reply to cm…
Social Security was deliberately designed NOT to rely on progressive taxation. Was this because FDR was afraid of taxing the wealthy? Hell no, he was perfectly happy to tax them at 90% plus.
People who think the “obvious” solution to Social Security is more progressivity in the payroll tax need to ask themselves why they think they are smarter than FDR and Frances Perkins (hint: they probably aren’t).
Any attempt to “bail out” Social Security via cap increases just reduces the ability to use progressive taxation to advance the rest of the progressive agenda, it enables the “I gave at the office” excuse. If I had my way we would be taxing the wealthy at Reagan rates or even Kennedy rates and every bit of capital gain would be taxed as regular income. But people need to leave Social Security the hell alone, the payroll cap exists for a very good reason and is a big part of the explanation why Social Security is still going strong after 75 years while more explicitly based welfare systems like AFDC and Head Start have either been gutted or perennially underfunded.
Social Security works because it fundamentally draws nothing from capital and so owes nothing to capital. Tinkering with the cap risks the invocation of the principal “He who pays the piper calls the tune”, which is why we are kow-towing to capital on every other facet of policy today. Can’t risk them going Galt! Don’t open Social Security to that line of attack, don’t screw up what you don’t fully understand.
That’s another nonsensical followup.
Progressive Social Security Tax?
The current system, with the cap at around 100K or so, is regressive.
For fun, when someone to your right says that they want a flat tax tell them we should start with the Social Security tax. I’ve been called a Red by relatives for that.
His explanation is pretty clear, if you think about it, from the perspective of how the GOtP wants to attack it.
The things we accept as common knowledge…thank you for prompting me to find this.
The Decision to Exclude Agricultural and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act
“The staff of the Committee on Economic Security recommended that the old age insurance taxes and benefits be limited to industrial workers, excluding persons engaged in agriculture and domestic service. The Committee on Economic Security struck out this limitation and recommended that the old age insurance system be made applicable to all employed persons. This change was made largely at the insistence of Mr. Hopkins, but was favored also by Secretary Perkins.
Subordinate officials in the Treasury, particularly those in charge of internal revenue collections, objected to such inclusive coverage on the score that it would prove administratively impossible to collect payroll taxes from agricultural workers and domestic servants. They persuaded Secretary Morgenthau that the bill must be amended to exclude these groups of workers, to make it administratively feasible. Secretary Morgenthau presented this view in his testimony before the Ways and Means Committee … In the executive sessions of the Ways and Means Committee, the recommendations of Secretary Morgenthau were adopted, practically without dissent. (152-154)”
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n4/v70n4p49.html
As far as your other objections, I don’t think any further exchange will be productive. Regressive taxes have historically been more acceptable to all citizens. You can google the debate, but I think wage stagnation is what has produced the crisis, not the cap.
This is spin. I think it was pretty clear he wanted the grand bargain.
As he noted in his interview with the Des Moines Register:
” But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending, and work to reduce the costs of our health care programs.”
I don’t buy the argument this was some sort of 11th dimension chess. He wanted a deal.
So why did he completely change his mind?
Because he needs to be in tune with where his party is, and the party is saying expand benefits, don’t cut them. And it’s been rewarded. It is political self interest.
I suspect on a personal level if he could get a minimum wage increase and/or tax increase he’d still take the bargain. But trying to get into pols minds is a fools game and it’s a waste of time. I didn’t care then. I don’t care now.
If we followed your political logic we might still be in the defensive crouch of offering concessions that don’t need to be offered to seem “serious”.
Anyway, neither of us are going to be convinced. I discussed this issue at length with Booman in person over dinner; wasn’t convinced then, not convinced now.
It should be obvious that I was right by now.
Let’s just say I agree with Scott — however, with qualifications. I think a deal was in hand and on the table. Boehner just sucks at his job and can’t deliver. Now you’ll say “but he knew (bet) on Boehner not delivering!” And it’ll be a forever dance.
Remember that Boehner claimed that the President “moved the goalposts” on him after he put a firm offer on the table to the Speaker:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/obama-vs-boehner-who-killed-the-debt-deal.html?_r=0
I don’t find The Orange Man to be a trustworthy person, but this claim fits into the idea that the President didn’t really want a Grand Bargain where he gave as good as he got. He knew that the Speaker was having problems holding his caucus together as it was, and a single additional revenue straw would break the back of the Grand Bargain negotiations.
Boehner knew what happened.
He knew he got played.
But a lot of progressives wouldn’t listen because he’s Boehner.
It’s obvious that you’re trying to rewrite reality, at any rate. Please explain this, then, if your brilliant explanation has it all figured.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011504114_2.html?sid=ST2009011
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You’ve insisted that we don’t need appeals to 11-dimensional chess to understand why it was such a historically-brilliant gambit for a Democratic president to offer to cut Social Security, but your entire story about why this is the case rests on said offer being made as part of the whole Grand Bargain deficit showdown. Multiple people have pointed out to you, just here in this one thread, that Obama had his sites set on SS/Medicare in 2009, 2008, 2006, and possibly even before. You won’t even acknowledge that they’re doing so, and as if that isn’t enough of a feat of defying objective reality, are even quoting Lemieux’s bafflingly-stupid “if you really think about it, not instituting chained CPI is basically an expansion of SS since benefits are currently set to grow as is hehehe (fart noise)” argument in setting out what you say you agree with. So since you’re so clearly right that you feel you simply assert that to be the case, maybe you could slow down for us peons, just once, and explain how Obama wanting to cut benefits in 2006 shows that your BS cover-laying theory about how this was all down to the grand bargain holds any water whatsoever, you arrogant ass?
There was blog discussion of SS cuts in Sept 2010. Why weren’t the 2010 losses considered third rail?
As someone whose entire income is based on Social Security and a federal pension, I haven’t seen any appreciable increase since 2005. Maybe the actual grand bargain was to let SS/pensions die a slow death from inflation.
I think Seabe is 100 percent right.
Because the rest of us forced the issue, if he wants to maximize his influence he cant go against what we did. Because years of gop and trumpism have finally forced him to acknowledge you cant work with dome people.
He changed his mind because we made him do it.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to understand that he could be operating with a plan for multiple contingencies at the same time.
But the worst thing that could have happened from the administration’s perspective would have been for the GOP to take the deal (any deal).
What was unusual, and I remarked about it at the time repeatedly, was that the GOP was so easy to game out, so it was no really a risk to keep walking further toward them because they weren’t actually trying to get him to do that.
On some level they were, at least when they sat down to negotiate, but the the way they’d set themselves up, they couldn’t do a deal politically no matter what it contained.
There was a brief period when Boehner seemed deluded about this and perhaps the WH was, too. But, when it got close, the president basically took the football away from Boehner and left him holding his dick.
The reason the WH didn’t worry about the optics of what they were offering is because the optic they wanted weren’t about specifics but about who was being reasonable.
And that was the right call, because if the GOP had gotten the upper hand in the public’s mind, that might have been all Romney needed to win.
I really don’t think this is right. He talked about deficit reduction in ’08. The catfood commission was his creature.
Obama was not by nature a deficit Dove, or a committed Keynesian in absence of the financial crisis.
He had an elite perspective on entitlements – and chained CPI is certainly that (a highly technical issue distorted out of all significance). I don’t think he thought he was conceding anything on social security, and I think he thought he had a deal.
From his selfish perspective, a deal would have preferable. Entitlement reform reduced outlays in the out years, but would have increased spending in the short term – which would have boosted the economy more than the sequester did.
Yes, he has an elite opinion on this issue. The Kevin Drum’s of the world who think it’s not really a big deal, plus look at what we get in return.
Sure, chained CPI isn’t a big deal for a lot of professionals. Indeed, when saving properly, 401k’s are also fantastic. But to the workers in the economy as a whole it is a huge cut (or failure, in 401k instance).
This gets back to the idea about donors influencing your opinion and politics…it isn’t quid pro quo, it’s an inoculation from how the median person deals.
If the President remains in the pocket of the elites, why has he completely abandoned Social Security reform? Why did he reform Medicare Advantage in the ACA so that hundreds of millions of dollars were taken away from private insurers, thus solidifying the financial viability of Medicare? Why did he expand Medicaid to tens of millions of Americans?? I could go on and on.
I mean, this is what is happening and has happened. This insistence that Barack wants to knife the middle class in the face of the full record is very peculiar.
Did I say he wants to knife the middle class? That’s like saying Anne Marie Slaughter of “wanting” Syria and Libya to be piles of ash. Maybe she does, and many leftists have surely accused her of and her ilk of wanting such results. But it isn’t something I’ve said.
The explanation for me is that he thinks a significant tax increase and/or minimum wage increase is worth (what he perceives) to be a minimal benefit cut that isn’t going to hurt that badly. Plus “political reality” demands “something” be done, and this is the least bad kind of benefit cut.
What he wants is irrelevant. He will respond to political reality. Some of us just have different ideas of what political reality means. In this instance, hold the line until more favorable conditions arise to expand benefits.
OK, thanks for your clarification. As you’ve observed here and elsewhere, many don’t share your supportable views here.
The good news is that the “something” that “political reality” demanded ended up being no entitlement cut at all. The final “something” did involve painful budget cuts, but it also reserved a substantial portion of those cuts for the Defense budget.
If we are talking about the 2011 budget deal, I wouldn’t be too triumphant about that. There’s a reason why Harry Reid told Joe Biden to piss off after that fiasco.
There was no way for the 2011 budget deal to be anything other than a shit sandwich. No way whatsoever.
It’s telling of the GOP’s utter inability to govern that the House is unable to undo the sequester, which cut the budget for their beloved MIC.
Sure it could: Obama idiotically negotiated the sequester and signed a bill in August in order to force deficit reduction to get his grand bargain. HE took that risk. He did not need to do anything but laugh in their face when they said they’d risk default. The end result is that we get stuck with the sequester, the Bush tax cuts are permanent except for those making over $500k, and a small extension in unemployment benefits.
He says his biggest mistake is ignoring his gut on Libya. Maybe. I think it was playing around with the debt ceiling to get his deal.
So you think it was OBAMA who played around with the debt ceiling? And you think the Republican Congressional caucuses wouldn’t have taken the opportunity to severely damage the economy right before the President began his re-election campaign?
As long as we’re talking about laughing in people’s faces, your misremembering of recent history is causing me to laugh in your face.
The Republican caucuses were in full nihilist mode throughout the President’s first term. They almost held together to completely deny the country an economic stimulus package at a time when the U.S. was losing over 700,000 a month for many months in a row. Two of the three GOP Senators who gave their votes for the stimulus, after watering it down a bit, lost their jobs over their votes; not even opposing the ACA and everything else which came down the pike during Obama’s first term could save their jobs.
We have a governing problem, all right. I think you’re misidentifying the causes of the problem, though.
We are to believe that we’d default on the debt? No. Sorry. That is a position beyond contempt. Notice how after that affair he does what I said: he has repeatedly refused to negotiate on the debt ceiling. Nothing has changed in the composition of Congress since then. Oh wait, it has: we had control of the Senate then. So it’s only gotten worse.
Think about the differences in the political moments.
In 2011, the President was about to embark on his re-election campaign, and the Democrats held the Senate majority. It would have greatly benefited the Republicans politically if Obama played hardball in the budget negotiations, said incendiary things about GOP irresponsibility, and the economy tanked. Obama would have rallied many progressives to his side if he had done that, but another descent into mega-recession would almost certainly have caused him to lose to Romney nevertheless.
From the 2014 election onward, Obama has not been running for re-election, and the Republicans have had to take full responsibility for the functioning of the Legislative branch. There would be no one else to blame if they ran the government and the economy into the ground but the GOP.
The President’s reasonable behavior in budget negotiations during his first term make it most certain that the Republicans would be blamed if they fucked with the debt ceiling or government shutdowns now.
He knows these things. Congressional Republicans know these things. This is a reasonable explanation of Barack’s change in behaviors.
The Supreme Court is normally an issue that’s in the back of people’s minds in elections. However, in this election, it is a certainty; Scalia is dead, and there is a vacancy. Why would Republicans not default on the debt now, knowing voters might punish Hillary Clinton for it, particularly since they control the purse? Republicans would have caved. Obama was desperate for a deal (see article cited by mino).
This is a completely useless conversation. Obama didn’t need to negotiate on the debt ceiling. He could have used other measures if they didn’t pass it (they would have). He did it anyway because he calculated that Republicans would accept a Grand Bargain because defense cuts were in the mix. He calculated wrong. This is his fault.
But there wasn’t a Grand Bargain, and Speaker Boehner directly blamed Obama for torpedoing the negotiations.
It’s hard to lay claim that Obama wants and/or wanted a Grand Bargain when the Grand Bargain did not happen in 2011 and the President is now calling for an increase in Social Security benefits. This idea that Obama is animated by the need to cut entitlement benefits is becoming a weird belief for people to hang on to.
And the Republicans have displayed to us that they know they would suffer electoral damage from a government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis in 2016 by the fact that they explicitly prevented one from taking place by funding the government past the Presidential election when they had sole power to do so.
However, unlike Bernie Sanders and many on the left, I did not oppose extending the payroll tax cut temporarily as its impact on SS is minimal and the amount of money in people’s hands for stimulus is substantial.
If charges are to made, perhaps a retelling is in order of WHY Reid was so burned:
From my after-the-fact discussions with Democratic aides in the House and Senate leadership, it’s clear that Reid had a plan for resolving the cliff and considered the breakdown of his talks with McConnell very much a part of it. By involving Biden, Obama undercut Reid and signaled that he wanted a deal so badly he was unwilling to leave anything to chance, even when the odds overwhelmingly favored him…
[…]
But there were good reasons to believe the endgame would play out the way Reid envisioned. Reid’s model was the payroll tax cut fight of late 2011, when he and McConnell struck a deal to renew the tax cut for two months because they couldn’t agree on how to pay for a year-long extension. The deal passed the Senate overwhelmingly, at which point conservatives in the House revolted. For a day or two, the outcome looked uncertain–polls showed the public favored the tax cut, but the House had dug in. At that point, Obama suggested to Reid that they reopen the negotiations, but Reid, according to the Senate aide, told him, “Don’t you dare.” Democrats held the line, and the House GOP abruptly folded. When all was said and done, Democrats got an even better deal than they’d hoped for. The Republicans were so eager to put the episode behind them they dropped their insistence that the tax-cut extension be offset with spending cuts.
Long story short: Reid’s strategy would have at worst produced a slightly better deal than Biden negotiated had McConnell accepted his final offer before the cliff (a slightly lower threshold for the new top income tax rate and a one-year suspension of the sequester rather than a two-month suspension). At best it could have produced significantly more revenue (closer to a $300,000 threshold) had we briefly gone over. But Reid never got the chance to execute it. “Their guys were running around asking to be forced to vote for this so they could move on,” says the Senate aide of the GOP. “Everything Republicans were doing signaled weakness and desperation for a deal. Unfortunately, everything out of the White House did, too.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/111749/inside-story-how-obama-could-have-gotten-better-tax-deal-with
out-biden
Thanks for a link. I didn’t bother searching for one myself and was relying mostly on memory. But that is exactly what happened.
It’s more basic. The liberal argument for entitlement reform (one repeated often by the Catfood Commision, and one I believe both Clinton and Obama believe) is that without it public investment will be inevitably cut.
I think the answer is different: the answer is that inefficiencies in health care (because we don’t have single payer) are the cause.
So you believe that Obama and Clinton support Simpson-Bowles?
Well, I guess you feel an emotional need to believe that then, because they literally talk about it not at all. That thing is deader than dead. It drives no discussions with anybody these days.
The ACA has dealt with many inefficiencies, admittedly far from all inefficiencies, with health care in the United States. As a result, the financial viability of Medicare is much improved:
http://www.cbpp.org/research/health/medicare-is-not-bankrupt
“Health reform, along with other factors, has significantly improved Medicare’s financial outlook, boosting revenues and making the program more efficient. The HI trust fund is now projected to remain solvent 13 years longer than before the Affordable Care Act was enacted. And the HI program’s projected 75-year shortfall of 0.68 percent of taxable payroll is much less than the 3.88 percent of payroll that the trustees estimated before health reform. (See figure.) This means that Congress could close the projected funding gap by raising the Medicare payroll tax — now 1.45 percent each for employers and employees — to 1.8 percent, or by enacting an equivalent mix of program cuts and tax increases.
The trustees’ projections incorporate the new physician payment mechanism and other provisions of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), enacted in April 2015. They also assume that the ACA’s cost-control provisions, including the productivity adjustments to Medicare payment rates and the Independent Payment Advisory Board, will be successfully implemented. The recent slowdown in health care cost growth and the trustees’ latest projections offer encouraging signs that these savings are achievable, if challenging.
Along with directly reducing Medicare costs, the ACA and MACRA payment changes — and payment reforms in the private sector — may encourage structural changes in the health care delivery system that will generate further savings. The trustees note that, in their projections, they do not assume such additional reductions in health care spending.
The trustees’ finding that health reform has improved Medicare’s financial status is consistent with the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that health reform will reduce federal budget deficits — modesty in its first ten years, but substantially in the following decade. Medicare is a part of the federal budget. Therefore, spending cuts or tax increases that reduce projected deficits in Medicare also help reduce projected deficits in the overall budget. Consequently, contrary to some claims, no “double-counting” is involved.”
You keep interrupting their sweet sweet music.
This music is a little sweeter, far as I’m concerned:
One thing I learned from this one-hit-wonder thread is that there was a Top 40 hit in 1970 called “Go Back” by a band calling itself Crabby Appleton. It is horrible, this song.
So the Chained CPI started as an attempt to better understand what inflation is. It did not begin life as a conspiracy. There is a reasonable academic argument that it more accurately reflects the true change in the cost of living because it considers substitutes.
But whether it actually IS more accurate is neither here nor there to the general public. What only matters to most people is the effect: does it increase benefits?
So I think of it differently: it’s a wonk versus populist issue. In a way it is similar to Clinton versus Sanders on college plans. Clinton’s is an incredibly complicated Rube Goldberg contraption. Wonks came up with it – and you might argue it is a more efficient plan that Sanders plan is.
Except no on can fucking explain it. it’s an example of what happens when you let DC types design something. Sanders plan: simple.
Obamacare: complicated as fuck.
Medicare for all: simple.
This is an underrated dimension of what has happened in this cycle. Liberal policies packaged simply have power. Policies produced by wonks might be good policy but they suck in political terms.
Amen, brother! They are designed as the shortest distance.
Neoliberal solutions are contorted to carve out rents for private capital. They sabotage the solution! Or at least it looks like it to me. AND they pick winners and losers.
Easier to simplify when you take cost out of the equation…
Taking the “cost” out of the equation also LOWERS the cost for the majority of citizens, a win-win, unless your one of the moneyed elite who profit off the higher costs of health care for the American people.
Well, you have to get Medicare for all through Congress. You can be “for” whatever you want in a vacuum.
Your talking politics, I’m just talking economics of the situation.
fladem, highly respect your opinion on most everything, but don’t understand your perceptions here. rule 1 of not doing something, for an administrator, is form a commission to study the problem. that’s what the catfood commission was about.
Ignoring the consequences in the mid terms?
Same logic would have said Clinton was right to do welfare reform. Clinton campaigned on it, just as Obama talked up deficits. After all, he vetoed the worse versions! But he “had” to do “something”. And the difference between Obama and Clinton on these respective heresys is that Ginngrich delivered, whereas Boehner did not.
Is it even possible to ignore a consequence?
Plenty of people do so everyday.
it’s always puzzled me why ppl didn’t see this, but I think most underestimate Obama and don’t understand what growing up blah in the USA is all about
Here BooBoo, here’s precious God-King Obama talking about how he plans to spend political capital cutting SS and Medicare before he was even inaugurated.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011504114_2.html?sid=ST2009011
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It’s so hard to believe this fanciful story about how this is all because of something that happened a couple years later because the timing of what actually happened in real life shows that’s quite clearly false.
I agree pure spin. I would go farther, Obama’s centerism has been a disaster for the Democratic party.
He absolutely wanted it. He was talking about SS cuts during the 08 campaign (though specifically denying he’d institute chained CPI) and had begun explicitly using the Stop Kicking The Can Down the Road meme and saying he intended to spend political capital on cutting SS and Medicare before he was even inaugurated. I don’t know if Booman, Lemieux et. al have been apologizing for him so long that they’ve bought their own spin or if they just have this little respect for their audience (I suspect it’s the latter given this ridiculous ‘not cutting SS = expanding SS’ formulation they’ve come up with) but it removes a couple of names from the list of people who can credibly speak on these topics going forward.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011504114_2.html?sid=ST2009011
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A Question of Racism
What’s behind the vitriol in the opposition to Obama?
By Michael A. Fletcher
……………….
The First Black President
A series exploring the cultural impact of Obama’s White House
“You lie!”
The words cut through the air as President Obama, not eight months into his first term, laid out his signature health care proposal in a prime-time speech to a joint session of Congress.
The outburst by South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson, challenging the president’s factual assertion that the health care law would not extend coverage to illegal immigrants, drew audible gasps in the room and withering stares from Obama as well as Vice President Joe Biden and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who were sitting behind the president on the rostrum.
It’s unprecedented for a president addressing Congress to be heckled like a referee at a summer league basketball game. Not surprisingly, the incident still rankles Obama supporters, including some of his closest confidants.
“Somebody should have smacked his a-,” former Attorney General Eric Holder said of Wilson in an interview. “They should have . . . told him to sit the f– down.”
Wilson apologized and was formally rebuked by Congress. Still, for many the incident stands as a prime example of how the unwritten rules dictating public respect for the nation’s chief executive and his family have shifted for the worse since the nation’s first black president took office. Instances of obstruction, scorn and outright insult have mounted over his seven-year tenure.
“There is a unique feeling of fear — hatred is too strong a word — but a feeling of anger, dissatisfaction with this president,” Holder said.
All of which raises a disturbing question: Is racism to blame?
The continuous challenges to the president’s legitimacy and authority offer a troubling counterpoint to the shimmering achievement his election and re-election represent for a nation founded on both the dream of equality and the reality of white supremacy. They evoke a shameful history, when whites routinely addressed blacks by their first names and adult men were called “boy” and otherwise diminished without a second thought, no matter their age or standing.
Any one or two or three of the slights to Obama could be dismissed as insignificant one-offs, the last gasps of a dying order that relegated people of color to a lesser place.
Best part to me about that picture is, President Obama is getting more popular each day and will continue to do so for a LONG LONG time. He will be remembered as a top tier president.
She, couldn’t even get a seat at the Trump Campaign four day circus in Cleveland this year.
Damn the Karma gods sometimes have a cruel and biting sense of humor, brewer done in by the Cruz acolytes.
In a sense, racism (and now sexism) has been effectively used by the ruling class to divide the working class. It’s always done that, of course, but why doubt that in the 21st Century they wouldn’t continue to do that? And what is the best way to incite those poor racists? Have a black president.
this was a very good article, thanks for sharing it
I can’t buy into this meme. Obama is simply a centrist who does not like deficits. If he was playing some eleventy dimensional chess, he fooled me. Count me out. Had he succeeded, I would not have voted for him. There are a few things that should never be put into this game lest the right wing thinks you are really serious. The idea that deficits and debt will somehow bankrupt us is nonsense. Far too many progressives believe that. We need to defeat that idea. When I heard Obama say we needed to tighten our belt like a household would do when in debt, I cringed. Imagine saying such silly shit.
Why must this always devolve into 11th dimension chess, which frankly minimizes the President’s intelligence and political skill.
He had 2 years to see the GOP’s strategy and behavior and all he had to do is see the situation from their perspective. What were they likely to do if he offered X, what about if he offered Y? Then see what they could accept and if they called his bluff what would he do then. It’s nothing special it’s just thinking through a situation beyond the initial engagement.
The funny thing is that I think nearly exactly like Obama.
We just come from a similar enough culture and have enough in common in our backgrounds, and we have the same temperament and detachment.
I felt this at first, but after eight years it’s no longer in dispute for me.
However I react to something or however I game something out, that’s nearly always the way he goes about it.
The main difference is that he often gets a step ahead of me, as he did in wiggling out of Syria, and as he did in coming up with the “leading from behind” thing in Libya.
I still think he should have stuff with his (our) instincts on Libya, and he agrees with me if you listen to him. He says it was his biggest mistake. Yet, he figured out a way to do it and not do it that I didn’t even identify as an option.
Same with getting Putin to remove the WMD from Syria.
The Republicans are a lot simpler as adversaries because they advertise what they are going to do and they have zero flexibility. It’s like shooting ducks in a barrel, but you do have to game it out and take it step by step. And you have to have a straight face while you’re leading them on into your traps. That means you can’t give very many winks to your own side.
That’s how you play this game.
I’m right with you. I don’t have the same experiences obviously as you two do but I understand and relate to his way of thinking and understand (usually) why he does what he does.
There are times I don’t and frankly since you have a similar understanding you help clarify it for me in those times.
The Republicans in Congress have basically said ahead of time what they’re going to do. Knowing that you can use it to your advantage, especially when you’re basically try to defend legislative accomplishments from earlier in his term.
This isn’t a complicated strategy but it isn’t easy to run, like you said, and let your allies know what you’re doing at the same time.
yes
“Yet, he figured out a way to do it and not do it that I didn’t even identify as an option.”
What the hell does this even mean? You’re sitting here preening about how smart you are because you’re a smart guy who games things out just like the smart guy Obama games things out, meanwhile, in real life – you know, where these things aren’t abstractions – Libya is a smoldering crater fought over by a series of rival warlord factions, made nothing but worse by our actions. But who gives a shit about any of that, right? For you this is about having a mirror into the President’s soul. You think like him, therefore he couldn’t possibly have been serious when he put SS on the bargaining table. That’s the decision you made over a half-decade ago when he first did it, and that’s the last thinking you’re going to do on it. That he was talking about cutting it several years before he even ran for President? Abstractions, just like all those dead Libyans. The only person that matters here is Barack Obama – and, of course, Booman, the very smart, very intelligent person who thinks just like Obama and thus knows that everything Obama does is good. Dead Libyans do not matter. The political style of Obama matters. It is not important not to kill innocent people in foreign countries. It is not important not to sell out the bedrock principles of the party you are ostensibly the leader of. It is important to figure out ways to “do it and not do it.”
I mean seriously, listen to this shit:
“The Republicans are a lot simpler as adversaries because they advertise what they are going to do and they have zero flexibility. It’s like shooting ducks in a barrel, but you do have to game it out and take it step by step. And you have to have a straight face while you’re leading them on into your traps. That means you can’t give very many winks to your own side. “
You’re talking about a budget deal that, years in the rearview mirror, everyone agrees was harmful for the economy. Everyone. You’re seriously this proud of Obama because the damage was not worse, and because a combination of Republican ineptitude and pressure from the Sanders/Warren wing prevented him from getting the SS cuts he’d been open about wanting since ~2006.
By the way: 38k jobs this month, Booman. Probably just a total coincidence though, right?
Jesus Christ Dude, go have a cookie.
.
I can’t buy into this meme. Obama is simply a centrist who does not like deficits. If he was playing some eleventy dimensional chess, he fooled me.
You are 100% correct. People forget this:
http://americablog.com/2012/05/obama-2006-too-many-of-us-have-been-interested-in-defending-programs-
as-written-in-1938.html
I hate linking to that place because Avarosis is such a bad person but this was the 1st correct result of my search(that came on the 3rd page). So Boo and Loomis(or is it Lemieux?) can’t seem to remember history. Thankfully the video is there too. And don’t forget that Obama was the only elected Rep. or Senator to show up for that.
Lets have the video straight from youtube then so we don’t have to care about the messenger.
LOL The success of the mindset of 1938 is a matter of historical record.
So is the modern gutting of defined benefits retirement available to middle class USians, thanks to the “global” excuses of bankruptcy judges and to that bastardized modern notion of retirement, 401Ks, that exist primarily to pay rentals to Wall Street. Oops! (http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2016/03/04/Retirement-Revolution-Failed-Why-401k-Isn-t-Working
)
But by all means, do to SS what was done to ADF and what is being done to public education, what is being done to the commons everywhere they can manage. All teh LOYAL Dems will be silent, doncha know, if Dems are doing the work.
That “Grand Bargaining” nonsense is what led me to re-register as a Pacific Green party member here in the great state of Oregon. Not that it mattered: the Greens here don’t seem to be much more than a post office box. And in the end I still vote Democratic.
I remember that the grand bargain idea did not come from nowhere; it came from honoring the non-recommendations (because of partisan irreconcilability of the Simpson-Bowles Commission. It is interesting that Republican Simpson always is given first billing.
And that commission was likely a condition for Kent Conrad’s vote for the Affordable Care Act. Was Obama blindsided by Conrad’s insistence on a balanced budget commission with Pete Peterson’s folks beating the drum, or did Obama buy into Peterson’s argument during a kum-bah-yah phase of bipartisanship? I guess we wait for candor and the memoir.
With Congress totally sabotaged and 7 months to go, Obama no longer has to be circumspect because his recommendations are for the next administration and Congress. He won’t have to lobby them nor will he have to implement them. How many Social Security recipients will shift to Democrats over Social Security policy? And how many will realize that Trump is committed to ending Social Security.
Was Obama blindsided by Conrad’s insistence on a balanced budget commission with Pete Peterson’s folks beating the drum, or did Obama buy into Peterson’s argument during a kum-bah-yah phase of bipartisanship?
Did you see my comment above?
You can cut the O-pologetics with a knife. To believe this, you’d have to believe that he had successfully anticipated the Grand Bargain, and had been rhetorically laying ground for same, since before he was first elected President. Of course you’d also have to believe that not cutting benefits from their current levels is the same as supporting the expansion of benefits from their current levels, which you’re also willing to pretend to do. This is why those of us in the party’s younger generations have learned not to trust a single thing you neoliberal backstabbers have to say, Booman. You’re absolutely transparent.
For instance, here’s President-Elect Obama, on Jan 16 2009, repeating right-wing memes about how we have to stop “kicking the can down the road” and “signal seriousness”: “This, by the way, is where there are going to be very difficult choices and issues of sacrifice and responsibility and duty,” he said. “You have to have a president who is willing to spend some political capital on this. And I intend to spend some.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011504114_2.html?sid=ST2009011
504146
How many times, how often, how consistently does he have to say he wants to cut social security and medicare before you wise neoliberals will believe him? Bush spends his second term trying to privatize it and your hair catches on fire, but Obama announces before he even takes office that he’s going to cut it and you spend 8 years figuring out ways to deny that’s what’s happening. Thank god for actual progressives who don’t fold like a cheap cheat tent the second the Pete Petersonism is coming from inside the house.
And shame on power-fellating apologists like Booman, Lemieux and their like. How freaking stupid do they think we are? “Yeah I’ll just say that dropping a proposal to cut Social Security is the same as supporting a Sanders-style proposal to expand it, that’s the ticket! These people are just that stupid, they’ll eat it right up!” Nope, but your open disrespect for our intellect is noted.