Ezra Klein makes the point that many on the left have been making about the President's policies, and how they formerly were policies that Republicans once supported. President Obama moved to the right in accepting these policies, and as a reaction to that, the Republicans moved even further to the right.
As long as we keep going on this trajectory of moving the Overton window to the right, we'll find ourselves where the Republicans used to be before the rise of birtherism, teabaggerism, and general insanity. Is that a path we really want to go down on as progressives and as a part of the Democratic Party?
It's why many progressives have been fighting to move the Democratic Party to the left because they see how the Democratic leadership from the top up is triangulating to the right and the center-right without including the left. So far, we haven't heard a mention of the People's Budget from the White House and from the top Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate. We've instead heard a lot about the Gang of 6, the deficit commission proposal, and the Ryan plan.
The silence from those in D.C. on the progressive proposal by the Congressional Progressive Caucus along with the media blackout is rather telling, and emphasizes the point that Ezra Klein makes in his column below. There is simply no room for actual progressive policies because they simply don't want a place for that in the conversation that goes on in D.C. between so-called "reasonable" bipartisan policymakers.
These [Republican] initiatives were wildly successful. Gov. Mitt Romney passed an individual mandate in Massachusetts and drove its number of uninsured below 5 percent. The Clean Air Act of 1990 solved the sulfur-dioxide problem. The 1990 budget deal helped cut the deficit and set the stage for a remarkable run of growth.
Rather, it appears that as Democrats moved to the right to pick up Republican votes, Republicans moved to the right to oppose Democratic proposals. As Gingrich’s quote suggests, cap and trade didn’t just have Republican support in the 1990s. John McCain included a cap-and-trade plan in his 2008 platform. The same goes for an individual mandate, which Grassley endorsed in June 2009 — mere months before he began calling the policy “unconstitutional.”
This White House has shown a strong preference for policies with demonstrated Republican support, but that’s been obscured by the Republican Party adopting a stance of unified, and occasionally hysterical, opposition (remember “death panels”?) — not to mention a flood of paranoia about the president’s “true” agenda and background.
Even though these Republican initiatives from the 90s were successful, it depends on the perspective of those calling it a "success." The Massachussetts experiment still has the problem of uncontrollable health insurance premiums.
And that 1990 budget deal that Ezra Klein mentioned in his article? It would never have been made possible if not for the fact that both houses of Congress during that time were controlled by Democrats. It meant that President Bush had to deal with them during that time, so it really can't be said that it was a deal that was really supported by Republicans and President Bush was attacked by those on his side.
Today we face a completely different situation where the budget deficit is concerned. We have a Republican House and a Democratic Senate that is divided upon itself. So what the President did as a reaction to that was go to the right, and make pre-emptive concessions to the right. Was that necessary? I don't think it was.
And my question to the community: Do you think Klein is right in calling the President a moderate Republican? Let's talk about this in the comments below and I look forward to the conversation.