I spent part of the day looking at Obama's deficit reduction plan, looking for that poison pill. It looked too good to be true—an aggressive and truly progressive position at odds with his previous efforts at bipartisan compromise.
On issue after issue, Obama would come to the table having pre-compromised away the progressive position in a bid to appear "reasonable", "grownup" and "centrist", only to find a GOP unwilling to accept that pre-compromise without further pushing things to the Right. And could you blame them? That's Negotiating 101. There was no need for Republicans to accede just because the president offered an opening bid that should've been the end result of genuine negotiations.
Yet for all the talk of being the "grownup in the room" and getting kudos from an American public happy that someone was being "reasonable" in Washington, the opposite happened. His numbers tanked. Gallup has Obama's approval under 30 percent among independents, 18-29 year olds are under 50 percent, as are Latinos and those with college educations—all key Democratic constituencies. As I kept saying again and again, if Obama was winning support among independents and other key constituencies, then he could hippy-punch to his heart's content. You want pragmatism? Cheer the guy when he does things that work. But they weren't. What he was doing just wasn't working.
Now, finally, he's taking a hardline approach to a negotiation. He's making a forceful defense of a truly progressive approach to deficit reduction. He has drawn lines in the sand with veto threats. My initial and usual skepticism was (finally!) unwarranted. This is good stuff. Is it too little, too late? Nope. It's never too late. We've still got over a year until the next election. In politics, that's a lifetime and then some.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Obama won't whittle away his position during negotiations. He still hasn't proved he can win one of those. Our best bet is still a deadlocked Cat Food Commission II with no action taking place and the Bush tax cuts expiring altogether. Then we can spend 2012 campaigning on a middle class tax cut. And don't cry for the Pentagon (not that you were)—those supposed automatic cuts will be quickly restored by Congress if the commission fails.
And that's the beauty of the current situation—we really don't need a deal. There is actually little incentive for the parties to come to an agreement. Republicans are desperate for cover from their disastrous Paul Ryan Medicare vote, and Democrats—now backed up by the White House—are in no mood to surrender the issue. Meanwhile, Republicans don't want to deliver any kind of victory to the White House, much less do anything that might create a job between now and November 2012.
The biggest danger we had going into these negotiations was Obama giving cover to Sen. Max Baucus to give away the farm on entitlements, giving Republicans the single vote they needed to gut our social net. That danger has passed, at least for now. We're finally negotiating from a position of strength. We finally have a president who is less concerned with process and compromise, and more concerned with actually standing for something against the GOP's economic terrorists.
Now we get to see how strongly he sticks to his guns, and we'll also see how his numbers move in response to this more aggressive and more partisan stance. Who knows? Perhaps those of us urging a more confrontational stance are wrong, and Obama suffers worse in the polls. I don't pretend to know what moves the American people. I still don't get Dancing with the Stars.
But I do know the process-focused consensus builder was a flop, and now we get to try something new, something inspiring, and something that genuinely motivates me to fight.
