Barack Obama Is A Fool

Obama throws the liberals under a bus. Well, guess what. He's going first:

Readers were greeted this morning by news that President Obama, the Democratic president, sometimes called the first liberal US president in almost half a century, is proposing cuts to Social Security in this years budget. This shouldn’t come as a great surprise. These are the ‘chained CPI’ cuts we’ve heard about for a while as what the president would be willing to put on the table in a so-called ‘grand bargain.’ So what’s going on here?

...So really this is just the President negotiating with himself, validating the wisdom of big Social Security cuts while Republicans are still saying — and show no signs of not saying — that no more taxes should ever go up ever.

...In conversations with the president’s key advisors and the President himself over the last three years one point that has always come out to me very clearly is that the President really believes in the importance of the Grand Bargain. He thinks it’s an important goal purely on its own terms. That’s something I don’t think a lot of his diehard supporters fully grasp. He thinks it’s important in longrange fiscal terms (and there’s some reality to that). But he always believes it’s important for the country and even for the Democratic party to have a big global agreement that settles the big fiscal policy for a generation and let’s the country get on to other issues — social and cultural issues, the environment, building the economy etc.

This has always struck me as a very questionable analysis of the where the country is politically and what it needs. But I put it forward because I don’t think these moves can really be understood outside of this context.

For what it's worth, the liberal blogosphere is rejecting Obama's move totally. Yglesias, for example:

The core issue is that this is a compromise the GOP has already rejected. They've rejected it in its details, and they've also rejected it as a general concept. So if this budget is meant to underscore Obama's eagerness for a deal and willingness to compromise it doesn't really achieve that. So what it's really meant to do is throw the extent of GOP unreasonableness and unwillingness to compromise into stark relief. But I don't know what the cash value of that strategy is. To any reasonable person, the fact that the GOP ran in 2008 and 2010 and 2012 on a platform of all-cuts deficit reduction makes that clear. If you need further evidence you can look at the GOP's negotiating strategy during the 2011 debt ceiling battle, during the fiscal cliff in the 2012 lame duck session, and all throughout the sequestration controversy. You can ask John Boehner. Or Eric Cantor. Or Mitch McConnell. There's a lot that's murky in American politics, but it's incredibly clear that the reason we don't have a grand bargain on the budget is that Republicans don't want one. It's time for John Boehner to show some leadership and get a deal done, but he doesn't want to. It's crystal clear and utterly unambiguous. The White House is frustrated by the fact that lots of folks in the media don't seem to see it the way I do and this budget is, among other things, part of a strategy to turn that around. But that's a doomed strategy. The ways of bipartisanthink are mysterious and won't be unraveled by any new proposals. To many people, the fact that a deal hasn't been made is all the proof they need that both sides are equally at fault.

Or Krugman:

So what’s this about? The answer, I fear, is that Obama is still trying to win over the Serious People, by showing that he’s willing to do what they consider Serious — which just about always means sticking it to the poor and the middle class. The idea is that they will finally drop the false equivalence, and admit that he’s reasonable while the GOP is mean-spirited and crazy.

But it won’t happen. Watch the Washington Post editorial page over the next few days. I hereby predict that it will damn Obama with faint praise, saying that while it’s a small step in the right direction, of course it’s inadequate — and anyway, Obama is to blame for Republican intransigence, because he could make them accept a Grand Bargain that includes major revenue increases if only he would show Leadership (TM).

Oh, and wanna bet that Republicans soon start running ads saying that Obama wants to cut your Social Security?

The folks at Daily Kos are no fools:

Where is the change? Republicans are executing their long term plan to perfection. It will be a Democratic President who slashes Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid, a Democratic President who guts government services, a Democratic President who has already locked in permanently almost all of the Bush tax cuts, a Democratic President who gets next to nothing done regarding sensible gun control. Republicans are also pushing the Democratic senate majority leader to end the filibuster just in time for Republicans to take control of the senate in 2014. It will be DEMOCRATS who fulfill all the Republican’s dreams.

Just cut my wrists now!

No, the only thing that will ever work is adamant opposition to the GOP, AND our fair-weather friend, Barack Obama!