Please convince me that I'm wrong, because I don't want to be right about this. I want to support the President as much as and as far as I can.
I'll raise two issues. I want to see your best rebuttal.
(1) I do not believe that the President is a Keynesian
(2) I believe that the President's Administration is stage-managing a series of events that will lead inexorably to significant cuts or crippling restructuring of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
I don't want to believe this, but I do. I don't enjoy believing it, but I think I must.
When I talk about a primary challenge to the President, with which I know many fine people disagree even if it is in largely symbolic form, this is why.
I know that you don't want to see that -- so convince me that I'm wrong.
(1) The Anti-Keynesian Democrat
I'll simplify the kernel of Keynsianism for those unfamiliar with it: The government should act in counter-cyclical manner to smooth out the excessive swings in the economy, by (a) providing credit and jobs during recession to stimulate demand and (b) raising taxes and reducing spending during periods of inflation to cool demand.
Right now, Obama is not pursuing Keynesian policy in two ways. First, he is not pushing for provision of credit and jobs during the recession that most of the country is in. Second, he is not pushing for raising taxes from the wealthy, who are experiencing boom times.
Obama's defenders may rightly point out that he cannot impose (at least most of) these policies by himself. He can, however, make the case for them. Show me, please show me, where he has been making a fervent and persistent case for these principles in a place and manner where the public will see them.
My concern -- not one I believed even a year ago -- is that Obama doesn't make this case because he doesn't believe in these principles. I pooh-poohed the idea that his being from South Chicago and teaching at the University of Chicago's Law School meant that he had been infected by Milton Friendman's economic views. But -- that is what it looks like. So convince me, please, that it isn't true.
(2) The rigged game on entitlements
The President established the Simpson-Bowles ("Catfood") Commission with rules that would have given its recommendations great momentum when they came to Congress. I thought that perhaps the President was merely placating Kent Conrad and the other deficit peacocks in the party, on the one hand, as well as respectable and well-heeled would-be butchers of entitlements like Pete Peterson outside the party. Well, I told myself, that could just be deft political maneuvering; "create a condition to give recommendations" is a classic bureaucratic means of shoving a problem under a rug.
Then, I noted that the Democratic appointments to the Commission, with the exception of Jan Schakowsy, were not all that good. (Well, I thought that Durbin was good -- surprise!) Obama seemed to have been caught off-guard when the Republicans like Paul Ryan (who was on that Commission) simply refused to go along with the program. The Commission failed to give a recommendation, but the President and the Establishment Media treated the joint recommendations of co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as a recommendation nonetheless.
Then, the President proved unwilling to assert himself in last December's budget crisis regarding the Bush tax cuts -- I won't call them "Bush-Obama" because I still think that the President would like them to expire -- and once again in the debt ceiling crisis of this summer by at least threatening use of unilateral powers.
And then somehow, in this deal, we got a Super-Congress that requires a bare majority (unlike the Simpson-Bowles Commission) to pass, so that only one renegade Democrat (like Max Baucus) need be the weak link on preserving entitlements and another (like the generally good Patty Murray) need be the weak link on cutting defense. And the rules are set up so that there's no filibuster, no amendments, just a fast-track slide from Congress to the White House. And the President, it seems to me, cannot be trusted -- cannot be trusted -- to veto anything that would make us scream. And people will start paying attention only after it is all over, and wonder how the hell this happened, and some of the President's defenders will say that he was simply outmaneuvered and others will say that actually this is the right policy at this time. And the media will say -- in part correctly -- that the gutting of entitlements with at most only grudging and symbolic raises in taxes (or else something worse, like a move towards a flat tax) is a bipartisan initiative.
Please. This is what I see coming. Am I right? Supporters of the President, please convince me that I am wrong.
Convince me that I am wrong, because at this point I don't see how a Democrat with dignity will be able to avoid supporting some sort of primary challenge, which even most of us who will support it would rather not see.
Convince me that I am wrong, because I am a Democrat, and there are some things that I cannot abide for a party. This is not merely about the 2012 election. This is about people looking back months, years, decades later and saying -- "yeah, well this is what the Democrats agreed to in 2012."
I support the Keynesian principles and the New Deal application of them that has been the life-blood of the Democratic Party for almost 80 years. I believe that they are now facing an existential threat and that as a Democrat I have to fight back.
Don't tell me that a primary challenge weakens the President; I know that. But in this case, the President may be weakening the President more than any primary challenge ever could. Talk to me about the facts, about this above analysis.
Convince me that I am wrong -- if you can.
10:52 AM PT: I'm taking off now, to go off with the family for a rare luxury -- a matinee performance of Into the Woods. So far, after a half hour, pretty much no one has even tried to convince me that I'm wrong here. I hope that before I return late this afternoon Pacific Time, someone will at least try.