Ezra Klein appeared on Lawrence O'Donnell's "Last Word" Friday night, and had harsh criticism of the budget deal and for Harry Reid and Barack Obama, who celebrated it.
Watching the Democrats celebrate a compromise that they hate is very peculiar.... To take this much money out of the economy right now is very dangerous.... The agreement Reid is celebrating tonight, an historic compromise, the largest spending cuts—if you use those numbers and just apply them down, it is 120,000 to 450,000 jobs lost. It is a lot of jobs gone. Not only that, but as they prepare for the debt ceiling fight, as they prepare for the fight over Paul Ryan's budget, they've accepted the frame that spending cuts are a terrific thing, that we should have a lot of right now, and it's going to be very, very difficult for them to walk that back. If you watched those speeches tonight, you would have thought that Barack Obama and Harry Reid were the guys pushing for more spending cuts and John Boehner came out and gave a short, businesslike just-the-facts statement, was the guy who had been trying to moderate the deal. The optics of it are very confusing, and are not going to lead to better policy down the road.
He expanded that idea in this post.
The substance of this deal is bad. But the way Democrats are selling it makes it much, much worse....
So why were Reid and Obama so eager to celebrate Boehner’s compromise with his conservative members? The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.
And policy defeats are what will matter. The Obama White House is looking toward the Clinton model. After all, Clinton also suffered a major setback in his first midterm, Clinton also faced down a hardline Republican Congress, Clinton also suffered major policy defeats, and yet Clinton, as the story goes, managed to co-opt the conservative agenda and remake himself into a successful centrist. The Obama administration has even hired many of Clinton’s top aides to help them recapture that late-90s magic.
That story misses something important: Clinton’s success was a function of a roaring economy.... Right now, the economy is weak. Giving into austerity will weaken it further, or at least delay recovery for longer. And if Obama does not get a recovery, then he will not be a successful president, no matter how hard he works to claim Boehner’s successes as his own. Clinton’s speeches were persuasive because the labor market did a lot of his talking for him. But when unemployment is stuck at eight percent, there’s no such thing as a great communicator.
Josh Marshall echoes a lot of this and talks specifically to the danger to the programs so critical not just to Democrats, but to pretty much all of the American public, Social Securty and Medicare:
As quickly as possible, the president needs to find a pivot and a political and policy footing (actually, they're one and the same) from which he can go on the offensive. It's as simple as that. Otherwise his posture and role in the unfolding debate is rearguard and reactive, energizing his enemies and demoralizing his supporters.
And what a pity since that pivot and footing are staring him in the face.
Congressional Republicans are using fear of the national debt as an opportunity to push through a series of radical and far-reaching policy changes that have nothing to do with addressing the national debt. Run that through your mind a few times. It's the key understanding everything we're going to see this year. If nothing else you know the Ryan plan isn't focused on reducing the national debt since it actually includes a big new tax cut -- a cut in revenues. Indeed, Ryan's plan is the equivalent at the federal level of what his ally Gov. Walker (R) did in Wisconsin -- use the short-term budgetary shortfall as an excuse to end collective bargaining rights. Similarly, Ryan's plan does nothing to rein in medical costs for seniors or even reduce the benefit levels of Medicare. It simply abolishes it outright.
As long as the president just focuses on dollars, he loses. He also helps misinform the public about what's actually happening. He deprives his supporters and the public at large of any real understanding of what if anything he and congressional Republicans even disagree about other than their wanting to cut a ton of spending on various programs and his wanting to cut 2/3 a ton of spending on various programs.
You'll know he's serious when he says he won't let Republicans abolish Medicare.
Unless, of course, he will. Which would sure be weird.
Obama's going to be presenting his budget cutting ideas on Wednesday, and we already know that Medicare, Medicaid, and possibly Social Security will be part of that conversation. He could, as Marshall suggests, pivot. Point out that there's nothing in the GOP proposed budget that actually addresses the deficit. That "shared sacrifice" has to include the wealthy and corporations accepting tax increases. That a budget cannot be balanced on the backs of the low- and middle-income people of America, the people Clinton (since we're invoking him) invoked in his 1992 acceptance speech: "all the people who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the kids and play by the rules, in the name of the hard-working Americans who make up our forgotten middle class...."