Rep. Van Hollen (Molly Riley/Reuters)
Democrats once again fail Budget Negotiation 101. With the White House apparently at the very least
flirting with the catfood commission (we need a
Magic 8 Ball on this one, because just
hours ago, the story was different), the House Dems have
gone all in.
President Obama will reportedly embrace these recommendations as a good starting point for negotiating a long-term budget for the nation—and he has the tacit backing of the Democrats' top budget guy in the House, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD).
"I think that the Bowles-Simpson blueprint provides enough running room for the President," Van Hollen said in response to a question from TPM at a budget presentation Tuesday at the Center for American Progress.
Van Hollen devoted most of his remarks to assailing the Republican plan on multiple fronts. But on Wednesday, the same day Obama plans to address the country to lay out a fiscal vision for the country, Van Hollen and House Democrats will unveil a plan of their own. There's likely to be plenty of overlap.
"The basic approach of Bowles-Simpson, which is to look at both sides of the deficit equation, that is revenue and spending ... I believe does provide, in that sense, an important starting point," Van Hollen said....
By endorsing the Bowles-Simpson approach, and not its specifics, Van Hollen's left himself, and the President some wiggle room. Both Obama's plan and Van Hollen's could pay rhetorical homage to Bowles-Simpson while embracing its more progressive elements only.
Apparently, they're ignoring the advice of Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has argued that Democrts need to do what they did when Bush was trying to privatize Social Security in 1995: don't take the bait. The bait has been swallowed.
In rhetorically embracing the demonstrably right-wing catfood commission as the "reasonable" middle, even without endorsing all of its non-proposals, Dems start these upcoming negotiations having ceded important ideological ground from the get-go. Van Hollen did make some good points, according to this TPM story, including the fact that the non-report from the commission's chairs assumed that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would expire. The non-report also failed to address in any kind of substantive way the spending and cost drivers for Medicare and Medicaid—cost drivers for the entire federal budget—continuing rising health care costs. But it is nowhere near a progressive, even a traditional Democratic, plan.
As Kurtz Beutler [byline updated after publication at TMP] says in the story, "Unless Democrats propose a much more progressive vision for saving these entitlements from rapidly rising health care costs, the middle point in the debate between the two parties will be decidedly conservative."