It’s like watching the run up to the Iraq War all over again. There’s this terrible, terrible thing that half of your supposed allies are complicit in, and the other half can’t mount much opposition to.
The fate of the American social safety net hangs in the balance, and all we have to defend it are insane House Republicans who seem constitutionally opposed to taking yes for an answer. If Obama is bluffing, he’s doing an excellent job; thing is, he’s totally cool with being called on it.
If nothing comes of this beyond a re-up of the debt ceiling, he’s still fought this entirely on Republican rhetorical turf – false equivalencies, triangulation, coddling and enabling hostage taking. Why can only Republican presidents espouse the ideals and values of their party? We can’t even get that baby step taken. No moral issues involved here, just ‘the math demands it’ finances, no drama milquetoast explanations, and technocratic details.
Congressional parties tend, in the end, to almost always follow their president, and so we won’t see an insurgency launched if the president stakes his reputation on it, and he is said to have told the House Dems that this is a ‘transformational moment.’ Thanks President Samsa!
They say this is Nixon going to China and on the surface this is true. In the same way only a Cold Warrior with a history of Red-baiting could go to China, so too could only a Community Organizer and Harvard Law Review figurehead undermine the three pillars of the Democratic Party. The difference being that Nixon’s overture to China can be counted as a triumph of détente, a repudiation of ideological zealotry, and a step that furthered human understanding between peoples. This purported deal-in-the-works is a confirmation of bellicose methods, an affirmation of ideological zealotry, and a step that will immiserate further millions of Americans.
Never before has any president said anything to Congress other than: ‘no, fuck you, raise the debt ceiling.’ But no, he’s here to do big things, like finishing the Reagan Revolution.
No Republican President has ever dared to propose slashing $2-3 trillion dollars from programs that benefit the bottom 90%, much less in the middle of the worst unemployment crisis in 75 years.
If McCain had won, this shit would have been filibustered, but we got charming President Bait ‘n Switch, and that’s enough for many right thinking liberals. If only you really could have a beer with him.
In 2012, the airwaves will hum with ‘Obama slashed Social Security and Medicare,’ the unemployment rate will be as high if not higher with this deflationary bullshit, and rather than fighting on the traditional ground of what’s left of the Democratic Party’s legacy – aligning himself with 2/3 of the country and setting up a situation in which he could win a decisive reelection, instead he fucks himself as well as the ordinary citizens of the country.
He’s so devoted to the plutocracy that he’d jeopardize his own presidency for them, which is more than one can say for George W. Bush and his ‘big government conservatism.’
He thinks he got all the angles covered, like every other president, when in fact he’s not much more than Wall Street’s cat’s paw, like every other president since Reagan.
Another reason we’ve been losing for 30 years: half the Democrats out there don’t believe in aggressively advocating for a vision of what this country could be. They want to wait until the president decides what the policy will be, and then they will grumble and ratify it ex post facto. Or, they will defend it on tribal grounds, just like the reactionaries. This is the posture of people who are either incredibly naïve or they believe winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.