Early yesterday (Monday) morning, I published this post: "How The 'Bipartisan Consensus' On Dodd-Frank & The Budget Enables The Pillaging Of Our Underclasses." A few hours later, I received the May 2nd edition of New York Magazine in the mail and read the cover story on Paul Krugman by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "The Loneliness of the American Liberal."
It covers much of the ground which I wrote about on Monday, including its focus upon the reality that the current definition of a "bipartisan consensus" in our government pretty much excludes most political ideology to the left of center in U.S. politics, today.
There are some real gems in Wallace-Wells' piece, including behind-the-scenes commentary by President Obama in December, in a 90-minute, "off-the-record" meeting, speaking to Krugman and a group of five other "liberal economic thinkers" (Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and economists Jeffrey Sachs, Alan Blinder and Larry Mishel) at the White House, the day after "...the president had announced a deal with congressional Republicans, agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts in exchange for middle-class tax relief and an extension of unemployment benefits."
...It was a month after the midterms, and many progressives were worried that even the modified liberalism of the administration’s first two years would dissolve in a new spirit of conciliation with the ascendant right. The economists present understood the meeting, one of them says, as the moment when Obama “talked to the left...”
...
...Now, in the Oval Office, he [President Obama] told his guests that this effort had been his “last chance to move the dial” on jobs, as one economist present recalls, and that, with the exception of smaller initiatives (he mentioned infrastructure spending), the politics had now made further stimulus impossible...
(That's a pretty incredible couple of blurbs, immediately above, IMHO.)
In my post from early Monday, I covered Robert Reich's commentary from a few days earlier...
Beware the “Middle Ground” of the Great Budget Debate
Robert Reich
RobertReich.org
Thursday, April 21st, 2011
How debates are framed is critical because the “center” or “middle ground” is supposedly halfway between the two extremes.
We continue to hear that the Great Budget Debate has two sides: The President and the Democrats want to cut the budget deficit mainly by increasing taxes on the rich and reducing military spending, but not by privatizing Medicare. On the other side are Paul Ryan, Republicans, and the right, who want cut the deficit by privatizing Medicare and slicing programs that benefit poorer Americans, while lowering taxes on the rich.
By this logic, the center lies just between.
Baloney.
According to the most recent Washington Post-ABC poll, 78 percent of Americans oppose cutting spending on Medicare as a way to reduce the debt, and 72 percent support raising taxes on the rich – including 68 percent of Independents and 54 percent of Republicans.
In other words, the center of America isn’t near halfway between the two sides. It’s overwhelmingly on the side of the President and the Democrats...
...
...To think of the “center” as roughly halfway between the President’s and Paul Ryan’s proposals is to ignore what Americans need and want. For our political representatives to find a ”middle ground” between the two would be a travesty.
At that point in my diary I segued into Krugman's NY Times' column, entitled: "Let’s Take a Hike."
In his Monday column, Krugman tells us that, "At least [President Obama's proposal] it calls for raising taxes on high incomes back to Clinton-era levels. But it preserves the rest of the Bush tax cuts — cuts that were originally sold as a way to dispose of a large budget surplus."
However, he notes that it "...still relies heavily on spending cuts, even as it falls short of actually balancing the budget."
He rhetorically asks why someone isn't offering a proposal that acknowledges that the Bush tax cuts were a "huge mistake?"
Then he answers: "...the only major budget proposal out there offering a plausible path to balancing the budget is the one that includes significant tax increases: the “People’s Budget” from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which — unlike the Ryan plan, which was just right-wing orthodoxy with an added dose of magical thinking — is genuinely courageous because it calls for shared sacrifice."
And, therein lies the rub. As Krugman notes in another rhetorical question, why isn't it "...getting anywhere near as much attention as the much less serious Ryan proposal? It’s true that it has no chance of becoming law anytime soon. But that’s equally true of the Ryan proposal."
But, he explains, the Progressive Caucus' proposal avoids "savaging" the middle and lower classes.
What Krugman's saying, today, is very similar to what Reich told us a few days ago: We're witnessing another "debate" between centrists and those on the far right. And, last I checked, that's not a "bipartisan consensus" at all.
And then, later on Monday, I read something that conveyed what I was trying to say better than anything I had written, from the first two paragraphs from Benjamin Wallace-Wells' "The Loneliness of the American Liberal," in the May 2nd edition of New York Magazine...
The Loneliness of the American Liberal
Benjamin Wallace-Wells
New York Magazine
May 2nd, 2011 (edition)
If you are looking not only for clues into Barack Obama’s character but for a definition of what his presidency will mean to the country, then the speech on fiscal policy that he delivered at George Washington University the Wednesday before last is the most significant one he has ever given. It is, in its own way, an astonishing document, alive with the themes that undergirded his Philadelphia speech on race and his Nobel Prize acceptance, on the tragic enmeshment of American limitations and American strength. Obama was responding mostly to the Republican budget plan, and he understood exactly what its author, Representative Paul Ryan, had in his sights: “This vision,” Obama said, “is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.”
And yet, having defined the fight so starkly, Obama delivered a plea for compromise. He ended a stirring defense of the welfare state by explaining his plans to gut it. Then he said that even this proposed $2 trillion cut in government spending was only a starting point for negotiation: “I don’t expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach I laid out today,” he said. “This is a democracy; that’s not how things work.” There were notes of deference, and passivity: If Obama believed that his vision of society was at stake, why place it so squarely on the partisan bargaining table—or why not at least begin with a stronger gambit? This was, at any rate, the point of view of one particular strain of liberal reaction, whose position was summed up with poignant resignation by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “I could live with this as an end result,” he wrote. “If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no...”
It's ironic--if not downright mind-boggling--that the most important (IMHO) words in this entire diary belong to neither President Obama, Paul Krugman or Benjamin Wallace-Wells, but to another person who was in that meeting in the Oval Office last December...
...According to the most recent Washington Post-ABC poll, 78 percent of Americans oppose cutting spending on Medicare as a way to reduce the debt, and 72 percent support raising taxes on the rich – including 68 percent of Independents and 54 percent of Republicans.
In other words, the center of America isn’t near halfway between the two sides. It’s overwhelmingly on the side of the President and the Democrats...
...
...To think of the “center” as roughly halfway between the President’s and Paul Ryan’s proposals is to ignore what Americans need and want. For our political representatives to find a ”middle ground” between the two would be a travesty...