It may be that some of you with long memories may recall that, during the 2008 elections, I was a vociferous critic of then-candidate Obama, and an ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton. One of the biggest problems that I had with Obama at the time was his message of political reconciliation and his promise to change the culture of Washington. I also feared that Obama's lack of national political experience would handicap him.
As I saw it at the time, Obama's message failed in two different respects. For one, as a Democrat, I had little desire to reconcile politically with the Republicans....we had, after all, just spent eight years with George W. Bush essentially rolling us on one issue after another. Bush's presidency was hardly a model of bipartisanship. What's more, many of the policies he enacted were just plain wrong; the endless wars we find ourselves in and the economic recession we are still struggling to get out of both trace at least some of their roots back to the decisions Bush made while President.
The second problem I had with Obama's message of reconciliation was that it totally failed to take into account the Republicans themselves. The GOP of 2008, 2009, and especially the new Tea Party-fueled Republican Party of 2010 and 2011 are not at all like your father's GOP. They are not moderate. They are not interested in compromise and negotiation, and therein lies the problem. In order for the two parties to work together and put aside their differences for the sake of the nation, you have to have a mutual willingness to negotiate in good faith. The Republicans have clearly demonstrated that they have no such desire.
I argued passionately at the time that Obama was not a reliable defender of Democratic principles. Yet, I was overruled by my fellow Democrats. Obama won the primary, and I put aside my concerns and voted for him in the general election simply because I felt that John McCain would have been George W. Bush number two.
We are now a year and a half away from the next presidential election, and I can truthfully say that I don't think Barack Obama or his Democratic allies in Congress deserve to be re-elected in 2012.
The fact is, Obama's presidency has been a litany of bad compromises with the Republicans. Even before we lost control of the U.S. House to the Tea Party, Obama was busy trying to cut deals with the Republicans in order to garner support for the health care reform law. The concept of a public health care option, which enjoyed a position of support amongst the voters (if the polls are to be believed), was nevertheless dropped due to adamant Republican opposition to it. In the end, we passed a watered-down version of reform that didn't do everything that it could have done to improve the system....and we didn't get a single Republican vote to support it. Indeed, we were forced to resort to parliamentary maneuvering just to navigate the bill to a vote in the Senate over Republican filibustering. We spent over a year getting hammered politically by the Republicans over health care, and in the end not a single Republican backed us despite Obama's repeated efforts to build consensus. Then, when we used the process of reconciliation in the Senate to force the bill through over Republican objections, we took criticism from the GOP over that as well. Never mind the fact that Republicans harped on us for years during Bush's presidency over allowing a "fair up or down vote" in the Senate....when the roles were reversed, the Republicans saw no problem with using obstructionist tactics to deny "up or down" votes to Democratic legislative priorities.
Then came the wrangling over unemployment insurance extensions at the end of last year. Due to the unprecedented economic crisis, the Democrats wanted to extend unemployment benefits for those whose coverage was about to run out. It was entirely proper and noble to do this, since many people have been out of work for a long period of time. But the Republicans, flush from electoral victories in 2010, hit the brakes. They locked up unemployment insurance extensions and demanded that, as the price for their support, that the Bush tax cuts be extended or made permanent. I argued passionately against extending the tax cuts at the time. I said that it was unconscionable to even consider extending the tax cuts at a time of national budgetary distress. When the nation is at war, you do not hamstring your budget with tax cuts. It was borderline immoral for the Republicans to hold up unemployment insurance for millions of jobless Americans in order to secure further tax relief for the rich. And yet, ultimately, the Democrats played right into the GOP's hands. The Democrats agreed to extend the tax cuts into 2012, a decision which has paid and continues to pay political dividends to the Republican Party. Because here, scarcely five months later, the Republicans have won another political victory by forcing the Democrats to accept $38 billion dollars in cuts to the federal budget.
I will not argue against the notion that our budget deficit and national debt are out of control; they are. And I agree with the Republicans that something must be done to address it. I resent, however, being lectured about budgetary restraint by the very people who, five months ago, rammed through tax cut extensions with full knowledge of the hole that that was going to open up in the federal budget. The budget, any budget, has two components: revenue (all the money that you bring in), and expense (all the money you send out). The Republicans like to pretend that only the one side, expense, actually exists. They resolutely oppose any increase in revenue (taxes) to go alongside the spending cuts that they are proposing; indeed, the Ryan budget that they have proposed for next year actually cuts corporate taxes for 2012 still further. Never mind the fact that last year, I paid more taxes as an individual than the entire company of General Electric paid on its' 14.2 billion dollars worth of profits. Because GE didn't have to pay any taxes at all to the U.S. THAT is who the Republicans are interested in cutting taxes for next year, who they've been cutting taxes for for thirty years. In the 70's, corporate tax receipts accounted for about one-third of U.S. federal revenue...today, corporate taxes account for less than ten percent of revenue. Every time that the Republicans slash funding for programs serving hungry children or first-time mothers, every time they cut education spending and spending for scientific research, they are cutting programs that benefit our country in order to pay for tax cuts to businesses and individuals who are already paying historically-low taxes.
And yet the Democrats can't seem to coalesce around a message that explains that fact to the American people. Instead, we bumble around searching for some type of compromise while the smoothly-oiled political machinery of House Speaker John Boehner rolls up win after win.
I blame Obama, in part. Three years have gone by, and the man is still not ready for prime-time politics. Nobody can doubt that Obama is trying to do the right thing....and believe me, I respect him for trying to do the right thing. His healthcare policy, though flawed, is going to save this country billions of dollars over the next couple of years. His tax-cut compromise, though bad budgetary policy, kept the unemployment benefits flowing to people who desperately needed them. His recent budget cut compromise, though I do not agree with all of it, averted a government shutdown that would have had dramatic repercussions in the economy. But Obama is systematically being outmaneuvered in a political sense by the Republicans. The averted government shutdown (more specifically the solution we arrived at in avoiding it) has only set the table for another Republican-engineered political crisis: the debt ceiling vote. By mid-May, the U.S. will hit its' self-imposed debt ceiling, which is currently set to 14.3 trillion dollars. If Congress does not vote to raise the debt ceiling, then when the U.S. hits a debt of 14.3 trillion dollars we will essentially be forced to default on our loans. A default on our loans would be the end of life as we know it in the U.S, which has never defaulted on loans. Our creditors would likely refuse to loan us more money, or at the very least they would only loan it at prohibitively-high interest because we would be considered a credit risk at that point. The Tea Party might cheer the concept, but there is literally not a way to adequately describe how devastating a default would be to this country. Social Security, Medicare, Defense....everything would come to a sudden and screeching halt. An economic collapse and return to recession in such a situation does not seem unlikely.
Yet despite the importance of the debt ceiling, the Republicans under Boehner have already telegraphed that they intend to use the threat of a default to force the Democrats into accepting more budget concessions. All of the social policy riders (which had little to do with the budget) which the Democrats thought they'd resolved earlier will doubtless reappear, and more. Eric Cantor, one of the top Republican leaders in Congress, gleefully called the situation a "leverage moment" for the GOP. The Republicans know that the Democrats will be thoroughly unwilling to allow a default; the Republicans will therefore milk the situation for all it is worth. They will demand a long shopping list of policy and budgetary concessions that the Democrats will have no choice but to agree to, because a Democratic refusal coupled with Republican intransigence will result in the biggest budgetary disaster in U.S. history. It is a proverbial no-win scenario for the Democrats....either they sell out their principles at Republican demand in order to protect the interests and credit of the United States, or they stand on principle and get blamed for the subsequent default and economic calamity which must ensue.
But it's a situation for which the Democrats ultimately can blame themselves, because they've allowed the Republicans to frame the debate, and because they've compromised on things that ought not to have been compromised on. The Bush tax cuts, in particular, stand out. If those irresponsible tax cuts had been allowed to expire at the end of last year, our budget would not be in the same position it is now. Our tax rates would have returned to the level that they were at under President Clinton, the last time we had a budget surplus as opposed to a deficit...and while we have incurred more expenses since then, I think it's safe to say that at the very least we wouldn't be staring a potential default in the face in May if we had those extra revenues on hand. The fact is that when Obama agreed to the tax cut extensions, he set this entire chain of events in motion. The Republicans were the ones who demanded the tax cuts, but it's the Democrats who are paying the political price for the budget deficit that resulted. It's a price we're going to continue to pay; in 2012 we have another election, and the tax cuts (which are due to expire at the end of 2012) will doubtless be another issue we will have to overcome.
An experienced politician would have known that, and wouldn't have set the expiration date for 2012. Better yet, a more far-seeing politician would have recognized all of the implications (both political and budgetary) of extending the tax cuts at all. The fact is that the Republicans have us right where they want us. It's also a fact that they couldn't have done it without our help.
