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There is little evidence to suggest that either President Obama or House Speaker John Boehner gained much political leverage as a result of Friday night’s dueling press conferences or Monday night’s back-to-back speeches. If anecdotal evidence and public opinion polls are to be believed, the only sure thing that has happened as a result of the televised bickering is that the level of public frustration, which was already high, has reached levels not seen in a very long time. Personally, I have not been this worried about the fate of our Republic since the darkest days of the Watergate crisis.
Now, I have no illusions that what is written here has much impact on the larger political conversations that go on in the country, or on the debates on Capitol Hill, or on the strategy discussions that are occur in the West Wing. But in the faint hope that a little straight talk, like chicken soup, cannot hurt, I offer the following observations.
Last November, when he failed to embrace the Bowles/Simpson report and recommendations, Barack Obama missed the opportunity to gain both the political and substantive high ground on the deficit and debt limit issues. Monday night, by giving just one more speech filled with generalizations and some amount of “b.s.” (for example, that anything close to the level of savings needed in entitlements can be obtained simply by eliminating “waste and fraud”), he may well have missed an opportunity to save his presidency. As one who supported his 2008 candidacy wholeheartedly, who welcomed his inauguration with an enthusiasm I have rarely felt, and who continues to hope for his success, it pains me to say that.
But whatever the president’s failings might be, they pale in comparison to the way the bulk of Congressional Republicans have behaved and performed. Although I think Speaker Boehner would like to strike a deal, his effectiveness has been severely crippled by the rigid positions taken by the Tea Party and its adherents. I am completely disgusted with those who are driving the country to default, impaired as they are by the effects of a lethal mix of ignorance and hatred for the President.
And at least as bad as all of that is the political thuggery employed by Grover Norquist and his misnamed “Americans for Tax Reform”. Raising–or lowering–policy positions to the status of non-debatable theology, whereby compromise is heresy, represents a formula for disaster in a pluralistic, representative democracy such as ours.
Finally, even though I know from experience the downside risk for politicians in sharing blame with the voters (I was involved in some of the early drafts of Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise” speech in 1979), I also know that the people are not without some considerable measure of responsibility for the current mess in Washington, D.C. Citizens regularly want and demand more government services than they are willing to pay for. Compounding that problem is the fact that the voters helped trigger the current stalemate, not just by installing a divided government in 2010, but by making one half of legislative branch so extreme that working across the partisan divide in any meaningful way is absolutely impossible. To a degree, and like it or not, the voters are now getting a lot of what they deserve.
Cantor is the winner on the GOP side. His short trade is working out well and he has the Speaker’s job in the next term.
You mean Minority Leader, don’t you?
Dante, Freudian slip. Thanks for clarifying.
les, if you’ll recall, there was no bowles/simpson commission report. there were recommendations from a couple of guys named bowles and simpson but their report never got the required votes to be published.
The Bowles/Simpson report was dead on arrival for BOTH the President and the Republicans in Congress. The Republicans are only telling half the truth when they say the President did not get behind it, because they did not support it either!
Yeah, but the President pushed the creation of the commission after Republicans killed the idea in Congress. It’s right that the person who proposed the idea and was attempting to use it as a way to take the high ground in the deficit and debt debate should get the lion’s share of the blame for not embracing it.
Man this mirrors how I feel almost exactly. While I wish the president had done some things different, the most extreme from the republican party and Grover make me nervous about our country’s future. If we are going to have as promising of future as past, several changes need to be made. Entitlement reforms, higher taxes, changes to education.. all of which promise to be politically difficult to make good choices. We can’t even raise the debt ceiling and risk deepening the recession or worse.
My political preferences lean to the left to be sure, so if I could choose a party to be in power it would be democrats. But I wonder if having the dysfunctional government we have now isn’t worse then having a tea party run government that would gut the federal system. At least we would be doing things.. It seems like often the worst option is to do nothing. I hope for a brighter future, but I’m feeling pretty pessimistic.
But I wonder if having the dysfunctional government we have now isn’t worse then having a tea party run government that would gut the federal system.
No – it’s a lot better. Trust me.
While the budgetary issues seem intractable, Government bureaucracy is working these days. Food suppliers are being inspected again, polluters are being audited again, states that are weak on enforcement of the Federal Programs they sought authority for are being pressed to actually meet their responsibilities, FEMA is functional.
The problems that piled up during the Bush era of willful executive branch neglect of the federal bureaucracy were significant. Remember all the horror stories from those years? Notice how they haven’t been as bad or as many lately? That’s not simply because the media doesn’t cover them … it’s because the Heritage-vetted hacks that the Bush Admin filled the bureaucracy with are being swept out or marginalized and people who actually believe Government fills an important role have been empowered.
People who don’t think life in America would get far far worse if the Federal Government was run by Tea Partiers (Bush, after all, actually kind of believed in Government, even if its main purpose was to serve Corporations) just haven’t a clue. Sorry.
+billion
“It seems like often the worst option is to do nothing.”
While this is not one of those times, there are cases, such as the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts, where a do-nothing Congress is preferable. I can’t think of a situation in which the insane extremism of the TEA party would be preferable.
Yea I didn’t mean to suggest I support anything I’ve heard from them, but I think there are several situations where doing nothing is the worst move.
Although health reform will likely curtail growth, it doesn’t sound like it will be enough of a margin. We are still going to have huge problems a few decades from now if you don’t do more, but it doesn’t look like we will be able to.
Social Security has huge budget shortfalls overtime and something needs to be done. While I certainly don’t support privatizing it, not being able to come up with the money might even be a worse option.
I think education is one of the most important things we need to improve on to be successful in the future. And if the current mess is any indication, when education reform is on the table, republicans will just disagree with obama no matter how much he moves to the center for them. Leaving it as is will be a poor choice.
Bush tax cuts expiring are probably the exception as something that is best if there is inaction.
All in all, my point is only that the dysfunctional government is very disheartening to me, not to give any support for extremists.
If nothing else, the GOP has managed to undermine Democratic confidence in Obama’s ability to handle a major crisis. I have to agree with Frum and Francis: the Administration should have been more active immediately after the 2010 mid-terms when the Republicans were desperate to extend the Bush tax cuts. Today, Obama seems to be in a lose-lose position. The GOP demands unconditional surrender, meaning draconian spending cuts which would have a huge negative impact on near term economic growth (as we’ve already seen in Europe) while further infuriating Democrats. It’s difficult to see how Obama will survive the 2012 elections in this case. And if Obama doesn’t cave, the GOP will force an immediate ~45% spending cut as the debt ceiling cannot be raised… The likely result: a global financial crisis.
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The least bad option, both politically and morally, would be to demand a fair and balanced plan comprising both spending cuts and tax increases. If the GOP refuses, use the White House bully pulpit to drive home the point that Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton used the same approach and that both sides (GOP and Dems) should have to sacrifice something for the common good. If this fails (and it will), calmly point out to the frightened public that they are about to experience what Tea Party GOP rule means in practice as *EVERYONE’S* budget is cut almost 50% overnight. Things will get ugly, very very ugly … but at least it will clarify things and the Tea Partiers will be totally alone on the fringe after awhile. Even Wall Street will not want to associate with these lunatics after that. And the 2012 GOP nominee will be Bachmann or Palin, meaning Obama wins reelection as the least bad option.
MARCU$
Nope. Coming from this Obama supporter I think he’s doing just fine. Even if he pushed through a deal with only spending cuts and the reasonable Medicare and SS reforms, I’d still be fine with it.
Why?
Bush tax cuts be gone in 2012. And there’s nothing the other side can do about it.
In fact, the chances of that happening increase if republicans “force” Obama into a “weak” position.
“Last November, when he failed to embrace the Bowles/Simpson report and recommendations, Barack Obama missed the opportunity to gain both the political and substantive high ground on the deficit and debt limit issues.”
I keep hearing this and all I can do is laugh in disbelief. I don’t understand the backflips and contortions that many people put themselves through to place some of the blame for this disaster on the president’s shoulders. I mean, is a small percentage of the blame deserved? Sure. But that’s not where pressure should be applied. By spreading the blame around between the people who truly deserve the lion’s share and the people who are doing there best to deal with the fallout, you decrease pressure where it is truly deserved.
“But whatever the president’s failings might be, they pale in comparison to the way the bulk of Congressional Republicans have behaved and performed.”
So why lead with blame for the president or anyone else? I see this over and over, and it just doesn’t make sense to me. Academics and Journalists are used to hedging every comment in order to appear impartial, but there comes a point when you just have to tell it like it is, criticize the party deserving of criticism, and not create a false equivalence of any kind.
^+1
Exactly 100% dead on.
Pres. Obama took a policy view of the non-existent Bowles-Simpson report that you can take or leave. (I agree with Obama’s decision, but I recognize that one can reasonably disagree). And that’s fine.
But the GOP is 100% feral and insane.
That we’re even having this debate in this context (the vote to honor our financial obligations) to begin with is pretty bad– (1) Congress already appropriated this money & we already owe it, so they already said we’d do this; (2) the downside of not coming to an agreement here is the destruction of America.
And that’s leaving out that, once the bad-idea discussion started, Democrats have offered pretty massive compromises, while the GOP is pretending that the mere fact they’re discussing the issue is already a compromise.
Any column that can reasonably be read to deserve the headline “The Blame Is Divided” needs to be rewritten to make this context abundantly clear.
“Citizens regularly want and demand more government services than they are willing to pay for.”
True. But not all citizens. Most of the citizens to whom you refer vote Republican. They enthusiastically endorse the theory of the “tax fairy” which explains that tax cuts pay for themselves in government revenue. It’s a free lunch!
The quotation applies particularly well to “fiscal conservative” Congressmen who vote against government spending for which they take full credit back home at ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
Bingo.
There’s a third party in the blame game- Americans themselves, especially GOPers who believe in the Tax Fairy (nice,Graychin) and demand that he continue to deliver his gifts even when he’s tapped and has nowhere else to go. These voters place elected officials, and therefore our country, in an untenable position because all they can think about is their individual pocketbook.
Les Francis: “Last November, when he failed to embrace the Bowles/Simpson report and recommendations, Barack Obama missed the opportunity to gain both the political and substantive high ground on the deficit and debt limit issues.”
You do realize, given the amount of hate the Tea Party GOP has for Obama that if he had embraced the Simpson-Bowles plan, the House GOP and their Senate allies would have rejected it outright. Look at what has been said of the Gang of Six plan, especially after Obama said he approved of it. The Tea Party GOP compared it to devilish incarnation.
I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that the irrational GOP hatred of Obama is even greater than their desire to decimate the federal government.
Divided? Perhaps. But certainly not evenly.
You make some excellent points about what’s happened to our government. However, even though it is the people who have elected these clowns, I wouldn’t go so far as to say we “deserve” it. The problem is that the public is never given a true understanding of how today’s government works. Everything is spin by the two parties, by the P.R. departments of government offices, and especially by the politicians themselves. We are constantly given false choices about nearly every issue, and most media are in the pockets of either of the two parties, so getting any clarity and honesty from them is fantasy. I will also add that as this country continues its downward spiral with an ineffective government, more Americans will band together like the Tea Party to affect change. The noise will continue to get louder.
Blah, blah, blah. You vote Republican, this is what you get.
“Blame for Debt talks is divided.” Not where I’m standing. And apparently, Senator McCain agrees with me. Frankly, it looks like Rush Limbaugh does lead the Republican Party. He wanted America to fail, and his lemmings are about to lead us over a cliff. So – the goal is on its way to being achieved. Who knew that the Republican Party was so uneducated, so weak, and so lacking in principles that they would allow the Tea Party to make them look like silly fools. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed that this would happen.
P.S. I thought Rep. Boehner was a whole lot smarter than this.
Oh, and just as a side note – all President Obama has to do is use the 14th amendment as an excuse to raise the debt limit (there should have been no conditions with that decision anyway). If he does that, he will look like a strong President who has just taken toys from the ignorant kids who are unable to “play” without fighting. The cards are definitely in his hands.