One of the oft-repeated comments I've heard Obama making that I couldn't figure out was his belief that he was showing political courage during these debt ceiling negotiations. It seemed to me that Obama has never particularly valued courage (cf: his confused press conference on extending the Bush tax cuts, where he likened the GOP to hostage-takers, and then praised them for their patriotism and willingness to deal) in politics.
In addition, nothing Obama was doing seemed particularly brave. An Establishment politician seeking to curry media favor by trying to eviscerate Social Security? That's not brave. It's a money-maker, but it's not brave.
The press conference today cleared some things up for me. More below the fold.
Firstly, it was deeply gratifying to see Obama display some emotion when discussing the GOP. I've certainly been past rage and into blackened hate for the idea of a political party openly seeking the destruction of the country in order to express their racist animus toward one man. And I moved past righteous anger, to pity, and finally to despair as Obama enabled them one time after another.
As the talks wore on, it became clear that Obama was not just open to, but eager for a deal which slashed entitlements, as long as the GOP took the fall on it. I don't think that's changed, and we're going to have to worry about that going forward through 2013.
But what I didn't understand, because it marks a major shift in Obama's approach to politics, is that he was also open to winning the negotiations outright by walking away from the table. Until these talks, Obama has made plain his preference for a deal -- any deal. And while the Villagers were in open agreement that his needs were a bit strong, they definitely agreed on one thing: Barack Obama is a reasonable man. This reached its fullness in the infamous David Brooks column, "The Mother of All No-Brainers."
This was the combination of traits many of us feared; Obama shares the conventional wisdom that a Bismarckian mixed capitalist state is outdated, was (and is still) parroting debunked supply-side memes, and seemed more intent on agreement than on any particular policy approach.
However, as we on the left end of the Democratic Party have been pushing back, it's become clear that no deal which is acceptable to the Teabaggers will be acceptable to enough Democrats to pass the House. And no deal acceptable to the House has much of a chance in the GOP Filibuster-owned Senate. So President Obama did what he has never before done in the history of his Presidency: he went to Plan B.
In making these two radical departures from his previous style, Obama opened up a win-win result from these negotiations. Either Obama gets the cuts he wants (and the blame going to whom he wants), or he gets to establish his preferred narrative for the 2012 elections as he unilaterally sees to the debt limit. It's a narrative simple enough that even the Village can follow it: Obama and the Dems may not be perfect, but the GOP is crazy. He even gave the Village a way to leave race out of the equation, or at least below the surface. To summarize: either Obama is a brave one-termer facing down his own party to dismantle our safety net, or he's a guaranteed two-termer with options in 2012 to take on other problems. And that's where "courage" comes in.
President Obama, in moving to a more flexible style of management and finding himself willing (finally) to not make a deal created the possibility of success for himself. And all we on the Professional Left had to do was push back hard enough. We'll have to keep pushing; he seems to have drunken the supply-side Kool-Aid, and we have millions of Americans to help find jobs. Not to mention tens of thousands of roads and bridges and subway tunnels to fix. But now we know that it is possible that Barack Obama will let himself win.
Post Script: the tide of Obama's self-destructiveness seems to have ebbed a bit. Anyone who knows someone that is bent on their own failure knows that it's impossible to help. It seems that President Obama has finally come to the conclusion that even he is incapable of using the GOP's hate for himself as a political tool. And thus, perhaps he will stop empowering it.