This is not a diary about the merits of the deal that was struck to raise the debt ceiling. Rather, this is a diary about the question of Barack Obama's strategy during the negotiations, and what they indicate about his political ideology. I think we can finally answer that question definitively.
Over the last couple of weeks, there have been alternate descriptions of the statements and leaks from the White House about entitlement cuts as part of the negotiations about the debt ceiling. As word came out that the President said he'd consider changing the formula by which Social Security calculated inflation in order to provide Cost of Living Allowance increases, or raising the age at which people qualified for Medicare coverage, observers here and across the political landscape tried to explain why Obama would stake out positions so at odds with the fundamental Democratic position on protecting entitlements. On the one hand, we had people who took the President's word at face value and stated that he was genuinely making these offers in good faith, either because he thought it necessary in order to get a deal, or because he thought cuts to entitlements had to happen for budget reasons or, most extreme of all, because he was a "disaster capitalist" seeking to use the situation as a pretext to eliminate programs he opposed for ideological reasons.
On the opposing side, we had people like Lawrence O'Donnell, arguing that these offers were always a feint, made in bad faith in order to produce the appearance that he was working hard to hammer out a deal, but that his constant pairing of them with demands for revenue increases demonstrated that he was merely posturing to make the Republicans look bad for not accepting his "generous" offers, but that his demands for tax hikes were insurance that these offers would never be accepted. Well, we now have our answer: it is clear that Obama was using the offers of entitlement cuts as a political strategy.
We now have the details of the deal. First, there are $900 billion in cuts that have been agreed to. There are absolutely no cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid in this agreement. If the White House wanted these cuts so badly, why are they not included in this round? Did the Republicans stop them?
Second, the agreement creates a commission charged with finding another $1.2-1.5 trillion in cuts over the next ten years. As an enforcement mechanism, the deal includes a "trigger," consisting of $750 billion in domestic spending cuts and $750 billion in military spending cuts over the next decade. It is possible that the commission will agree to some entitlement cuts, but there is one important condition: Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits - that is, the entitlement cuts that Obama "put on the table" are explicitly excluded from the trigger. That's right, the very items that Obama was, supposedly, looking to trade away (or to do away with deliberately for their own sake, that scoundrel) are specially protected in a way that other deficit-reducers are not. How do you suppose that happened? Perhaps John Boehner put that part in the deal?
Neither of these elements of the deal are consistent with the theory that Obama was making a genuine effort to include entitlement cuts like the changing the Social Security COLA formula or raising the Medicare age in this deal. Indeed, excluding those wished-for Republican ideas from the first round of cuts, and carving out special exceptions for them in the budget trigger, are strong evidence to the contrary. None of this is a guarantee that there won't ultimately be any such changes included in the final deal, but the special protections they received are a strong indication that the White House is not eager to trade them away, but rather, considers their preservation a priority. As a Democratic White House should.
There's an old saying that "You are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts." There are surely many opinions about the value of this strategy, about how it framed the debate, about how it looked from the outside, and we can have long conversations about those opinions. However, we need to start from a solid understanding of the facts, and the fact here is that White House was, indeed, making a show of offering up these concessions with no desire or intention to actually see them implemented.