The "Obama's Brilliant Strategy" Theory
Marty Kaplan
HuffPost
Posted: 7/11/11
If you voted for Obama, here's what you're not supposed to be thinking:
He turns out to be a lousy poker player. He negotiates with himself. He thinks compromise takes only one to tango. He imputes good will to lethal adversaries. He allows them define the turf he fights on. He lets them keep moving the goalposts. He has no stomach for combat and no instinct for the jugular. Huge majorities want him to hang tough on the stands that got him elected, but he doesn't have the belly fire to call out his opponents and rally the country to his side. He believes that reason is kryptonite to bullies. He misses Larry Summers. He doesn't want Tim Geithner to go. He's confident that the CEO of GE has the best interests of the American worker at heart. He actually likes John Boehner.
It's understandable that his 2008 base might be waking up with those night sweats. It's not lefty fanaticism to imagine that the health care bill would have turned out stronger if his opening position was the public option he campaigned on, instead of the deals with the drug industry and the for-profit hospital lobby that he made at the outset. In the 2010 lame duck session, when he signed on to a "temporary" two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts on the rich, you didn't have to be a liberal ideologue to wonder whether an FDR-like use the bully pulpit could have won a better deal.
But nothing has tested the loyalty of Obama voters more than the current negotiations to raise the debt limit. In the wake of the Ryan plan to end Medicare -- wildly popular with Republican legislators, and wildly unpopular with Americans -- the administration has bafflingly sabotaged its sharpest contrast with the GOP by putting Medicare on the bargaining table. And Social Security, too, even though it has nothing to do with the debt ceiling, or even the deficit. And while Republicans keep upping their spending cut demands by hundreds of billions of dollars, the president has pre-emptively abandoned any attempt to restore Clinton-era tax rates on millionaires, another lopsidedly popular proposal among Americans, and he has instead bought in to his opponents' narrative that the reason American businesses are sitting on trillions of dollars of cash is because they lack "certainty" about future tax policy.
(More here.)
HuffPost
Posted: 7/11/11
If you voted for Obama, here's what you're not supposed to be thinking:
He turns out to be a lousy poker player. He negotiates with himself. He thinks compromise takes only one to tango. He imputes good will to lethal adversaries. He allows them define the turf he fights on. He lets them keep moving the goalposts. He has no stomach for combat and no instinct for the jugular. Huge majorities want him to hang tough on the stands that got him elected, but he doesn't have the belly fire to call out his opponents and rally the country to his side. He believes that reason is kryptonite to bullies. He misses Larry Summers. He doesn't want Tim Geithner to go. He's confident that the CEO of GE has the best interests of the American worker at heart. He actually likes John Boehner.
It's understandable that his 2008 base might be waking up with those night sweats. It's not lefty fanaticism to imagine that the health care bill would have turned out stronger if his opening position was the public option he campaigned on, instead of the deals with the drug industry and the for-profit hospital lobby that he made at the outset. In the 2010 lame duck session, when he signed on to a "temporary" two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts on the rich, you didn't have to be a liberal ideologue to wonder whether an FDR-like use the bully pulpit could have won a better deal.
But nothing has tested the loyalty of Obama voters more than the current negotiations to raise the debt limit. In the wake of the Ryan plan to end Medicare -- wildly popular with Republican legislators, and wildly unpopular with Americans -- the administration has bafflingly sabotaged its sharpest contrast with the GOP by putting Medicare on the bargaining table. And Social Security, too, even though it has nothing to do with the debt ceiling, or even the deficit. And while Republicans keep upping their spending cut demands by hundreds of billions of dollars, the president has pre-emptively abandoned any attempt to restore Clinton-era tax rates on millionaires, another lopsidedly popular proposal among Americans, and he has instead bought in to his opponents' narrative that the reason American businesses are sitting on trillions of dollars of cash is because they lack "certainty" about future tax policy.
(More here.)
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