This is not a diary about the merits of the deal that was struck to raise the debt ceiling. Rather, this is a diary about the question of Barack Obama's strategy during the negotiations, and what they indicate about his political ideology. I think we can finally answer that question definitively.
Over the last couple of weeks, there have been alternate descriptions of the statements and leaks from the White House about entitlement cuts as part of the negotiations about the debt ceiling. As word came out that the President said he'd consider changing the formula by which Social Security calculated inflation in order to provide Cost of Living Allowance increases, or raising the age at which people qualified for Medicare coverage, observers here and across the political landscape tried to explain why Obama would stake out positions so at odds with the fundamental Democratic position on protecting entitlements. On the one hand, we had people who took the President's word at face value and stated that he was genuinely making these offers in good faith, either because he thought it necessary in order to get a deal, or because he thought cuts to entitlements had to happen for budget reasons or, most extreme of all, because he was a "disaster capitalist" seeking to use the situation as a pretext to eliminate programs he opposed for ideological reasons.
On the opposing side, we had people like Lawrence O'Donnell, arguing that these offers were always a feint, made in bad faith in order to produce the appearance that he was working hard to hammer out a deal, but that his constant pairing of them with demands for revenue increases demonstrated that he was merely posturing to make the Republicans look bad for not accepting his "generous" offers, but that his demands for tax hikes were insurance that these offers would never be accepted. Well, we now have our answer: it is clear that Obama was using the offers of entitlement cuts as a political strategy.
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