The White House story is that there really wasn’t any alternative to the tax, unemployment, and Social Security deal. Here are two good ones:
For starters, long before the Nov. 2 election, President Obama and the congressional leadership could have forced one vote after another on the unemployment extension and on preserving the Bush tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent of taxpayers.
Instead of belatedly blaming Democrats for criticizing his dubious deal, Obama might have relentlessly kept pointing out that Republicans were the ones denying unemployed people subsistence benefits and risking a tax increase for working- and middle-class Americans.
In recent weeks, Congress has mustered majority votes for both measures. The only thing that prevented them from passing was Republican filibusters in the Senate. The president could have kept pointing that out, rather than scapegoating liberals in his own party.
Instead of playing Mr. Conciliator, he could have stuck up for his party, as the party of regular working Americans. By using his bully pulpit to demonstrate which party was really playing roulette with the economy, Obama might have clarified differences and spared a number of House and Senate election losses to the Democrats.
Second, Obama could have remembered that the president of the United States has the veto.
He could have made it crystal clear that a measure that extended tax cuts for the richest (who have actually gotten richer in this recession) would be vetoed. As higher tax rates began biting for all Americans, the political logic of the situation would compel the Republicans to blink first.
What now? Can this still happen?
If House Democrats do vote down this deal, that could be the situation in January. The more heavily Republican Congress will likely pass a measure even worse than the one that is currently on the table, and Obama will have to choose whether to sign it or veto it. His own party can apply pressure for him to use the veto pen.
The question is whether anything will force him to be reborn as a tougher leader. In circumstances like these, conciliation is capitulation. Get rolled once, and you get rolled again.
David Brooks, in today’s New York Times, congratulates Obama’s statesmanship. “The fact is, Obama and the Democrats have had an excellent week,” Brooks writes. “The White House negotiators did an outstanding job for their side.”
When Republican spinmeisters tell a Democratic president what a great job he is doing, you know he is caving. To paraphrase Pyrrhus, one more such excellent week and we are lost.
In case you missed it, Andy Borowitz recently suggested that President Obama’s latest conciliatory gesture is to admit that he really is a Muslim.
"The American people do not want to see us fighting in Washington,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the White House. “They want to see us working together to improve their lives, and Allah willing, we will.”
But Mr. Obama’s willingness to back down on his claim of being a Christian does not seem to have satisfied his Republican opposition, as GOP leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) today insisted that the President must also agree that he was born in Kenya.
While Mr. Obama did not immediately agree to Rep. Bohener’s demand, he hinted that yet another compromise might be in the offing: “My place of birth has been, and will always be, negotiable."If this were not such a perfect caricature of the president’s capitulation style and the way Republicans play him for a fool, it would not be so funny. And of course, it isn’t funny at all.
-- Robert Kuttner
