Mr. President, this is just a short diary for your attention. The sentiments presented in this diary are echoed by many that voted for you. What follows is just a piece of advice from someone who is not part of the beltway crowd. I belong to the class of people that have to watch every dollar and every cent. I voted for you to avoid my Medicare benefits being reduced, but I did not know you were a two faced devil who was going to take my benefits away from me through the back door of chained CPI. Also what are you thinking in proposing to link student loan interest rates to inflation, do you think loan rates will stay low forever, if you do then you are more naive than I thought. What you should be proposing is to reduce student interest rates further and it should be fixed.
If you are in search of revenue, you should have let all the Bush tax cuts expire. But you didn't because you thought you were the smartest guy in the room and because of that, Boehner and McConnell played you. But you can’t now come and say to me I’ll give you money when you are young, but I will take it away from you when you are retired and you need it most. What kind of sense does that make? But that is what you are proposing with the chained CPI Mr. President. I think your advisers are advising you the wrong way, just as they advised you wrongly for the first debate against Romney.
I want to tell you that most Americans know that we do not have a debt problem; we do not have a deficit problem. Those are Washington’s games, and we feel sad that you have been co-opted to play those games. We voted for you because we thought you will be above those games, apparently we were very wrong. As I said earlier, we do not have a debt or deficit problem, what we do have however is a jobs problem. If you can solve the jobs problem, everything else including the debt and deficit will take care of itself. The success of Bill Clinton was in generating employment and that’s what made the deficit go down in the 1990s. Nobody remembers Bill Clinton because he brought the debt down or because he reduced deficit, people remember him because there were jobs and the economy was booming.
If you keep chasing this grand bargain, I promise you that you will become irrelevant to most people’s lives and your presidency will become a joke and you will have fallen into the Republican Party’s trap.
You act as if you are naive and do not understand the Republican Party. The party is not there to serve any policy, the republican party only cares about one thing and one thing only and that is taking power and using it to benefit a few. They will never see eye to eye with you no matter how much you try. You can abolish social security and Medicare, they will never like you. You can reduce the tax rate to zero and they will still berate you for not cutting it enough.
On the other hand the Democratic Party exists to serve the interests of the middle class and the poor. I just wanted to let you know that in case you need reminding. I will say it again, the Democratic Party exists to serve the interests of the voiceless, the interests of those of us who have no lobbyists. You may not know this Mr. President; you are our number one lobbyist. Your job as a Democratic president is to serve the interests of the lobby less majority and not the interests of the Washington Post editorial page.
The last time you went in search of a grand bargain, you ended up with this monstrosity called “the sequester”. You also ended up with the lowest approval rating of your presidency. If you continue in search of that thing called “Grand bargain”, this is what future historians will have to say about you “President Obama had a chance to be a really great president, the people were ready to follow him, but he blew that chance in pursuit of a mirage.”