Yesterday was a bad day for Democrats on the Sunday shows. Like an unprepared college student taking an oral exam from Professor Christopher Wallace PhD, Nancy Pelosi haltingly rambled from one stale talking point to the next. Dick Durbin trotted out the predictable list of awful budget cuts contemplated by dastardly Republicans. Which wasn’t too persuasive because the sequester was Obama’s idea. A 3% budget cut does not look draconian to Americans in the real world outside the Beltway; even the hyper-partisan David Gregory made fun of Durbin. Democrats look greedy demanding yet another tax increase – the second in three months, as more than one Republican pointed out. To those outside Obama’s inner circle, “balance” means “Last time you got tax hikes, this time we get spending cuts.”
This is the pay-off from Republicans finally making some politically shrewd decisions. They let Obama get his fabled “tax hike on the rich,” which was unavoidable and far smaller than it might have been. After a two-month victory dance following the November election, the media was looking forward to a “disastrous default on U.S. obligations” that could be blamed on benighted Tea Party Republicans. Instead the Republicans postponed the debt ceiling issue and tacitly accepted Obama’s sequester, while forcing the Senate to pass a budget.
So now the media lacks compelling anti-Republican talking points. Obama gets much of the blame for lay-offs at military bases, kids missing Head Start, cuts in cancer research etc. Obama can no longer pretend to be an innocent bystander to the “dysfunction in Washington.” Second, influential liberals in academia and the media will be slammed by the cuts; NPR has already run a couple of shows on “What the Sequester means to you.” They will start to figure out that the relentless rise in entitlements is squeezing their top spending priorities. Maybe entitlement reform is not so dumb after all. Third, a protracted, multi-stage budget showdown between Congress and the White House stretching through the Spring – first the Sequester hitting on March 1, then the end of the continuing resolution on March 23, then Round Two of the debt ceiling showdown in June — gives Obama less time to push other parts of his agenda such as raising energy prices and despoiling the American landscape with thousands of solar panels and windmills in a futile effort to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, which are being driven by China and India, not the U.S.. (If Obama is really worried about greenhouse gasses, he should pressure California and New York to permit fracking.)
Obama has a few other problems. The Benghazi bungle is not going away, with Lindsay Graham putting a “hold” on the nominations of Brennan and Hagel. The Hagel nomination is another embarrassment; in Washington, it’s OK to be an empty suit, but it can’t be a clown suit. New efforts at gun control have reenergized the Republican base while putting Red State Senators up for reelection next year in a difficult position. Now that they are done helping Obama win reelection the media are starting to notice his haughty intransigence.
Both economically and politically, Obama’s smart move is to drop the tax hike fixation and move on to entitlement reform, which would improve the budget outlook and boost business confidence without imposing near-term “austerity” that slows economic growth now. But he is too ideological to do that; redistribution and bigger government is a higher priority than economic growth.
Copyright Thomas Doerflinger 2013. All Rights Reserved.
