Jonathan Cohn has a quick evaluation of Obama's deficit proposal on the policy merits, but I just want to point out that despite the signs the president might tack right on this issue, he basically ended up giving the most full-throated rhetorical defense of American liberalism I think I've ever heard him give.
As I've written before, Obama's grand political theme is one liberals like and conservatives implicitly reject, his acknowledgment of all the "discrete strands of American culture as equally legitimate." So even as he defined America as "rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government," he nevertheless delivered a strong defense of the welfare state.
Part of this American belief that we are all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we say to ourselves, and so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, and those with disabilities. We are a better country because of these commitments. I'll go further – we would not be a great country without those commitments.
Notice anything about all of those accomplishments? They're all expansions of the welfare state signed into law by Democratic presidents, programs Republicans would destroy if they could. Here he is implicitly responding to the Beltway love fest over Rep. Paul Ryan's proposal to gut Medicaid and privatize Medicare:
The fact is, their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. As Ronald Reagan's own budget director said, there's nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. And this is not a vision of the America I know.
Obama closed by saying that "if we believe that government can make a difference in people's lives, we have the obligation to prove that it works – by making government smarter, leaner and more effective." I'm not sure that's a lesson liberals really need to learn -- the Affordable Care Act was a deficit-reduction bill, and it wasn't liberals who were clamoring to extend the top tier of the Bush tax cuts. It's fair to argue that what liberals want to do will require more than just tax raises on the wealthy, but it's also true that liberals haven't settled on a strategy of deliberately increasing the deficit as a way to undermine the welfare state.
Point is there was a lot of liberals to love in this speech. Don't think this will shift public opinion substantially -- remember the bully pulpit fallacy -- but it sends a clear signal to Democrats who have spent the last couple of days wondering whether they were supposed to run around defending everything in Simpson-Bowles now that the battle lines have been drawn. When it comes to specifics of cutting the deficit, the Democrats already had public opinion on their side anyway.
