Posted by
Bill Crawford on Sunday, July 17, 2011 9:13:07 PM
You know, the one with no end. Actually, it has an end. That is seventeen months from now, in a Presidentuial election.
The two sides are too far apart, and have radically different directions for the country. And questions this large need to be answered at the ballot box, not in a Congressional caucus negotiation with the President.
Obama's problem now is the same problem he had last year. Enough independents were scraed witless of his spending habits to power the Tea Party coalition to do what it did. While that was not enough to carry things past the White House, it is enough to prevent Obama from getting anything. He just doesn't have the votes.
Obama's mistake is in at once acting like the only adult in the room and then getting into the mud pit every other day. He is going to pay the price for that, because the Executive is a titular leader and he is expected to close the gap. Worse, he set incredible expectations for himself in 2008.
Now, he is like some pansy school administrators I used to know- the school budget fails and facing austerity, they carp about how school sports are going to go under. Faced with impasse, Obama gets in front of a mike and starts threatening that Social Security checks may get held up. Not only will this not work, but it puts to rest the notion about SS fund independence (and Al Gore's "lockbox") for good.
And the problem is spending. Past that, it is spending, spending and spending, in that order. To put it another way, we are at the same level of taxation as in 2007. Revenues are down because of recession. In 2007, the deficit was $400 billion. In 2008, it was projected to be slightly higher, until Bush's TARP deal added $750 billion to it overnight. Obama has used that as a baseline and we have run $1.5 trillion deficits since. It's not that we didn't lose the added trillion from unemployment- the government never had anything close to that coming in. That is what leads to my conclusion that it is a spending problem.
The Republicans also do not see any impetus to do Obama a favor and solve this problem for two years, so he can campaign for re-election in peace. They will solve this in a series of three or four short term deals, and the Republicans will get what they want because both sides do not want us to default on our obligations and they are the only side at this table who can get the votes to make a smaller deal and hand it to the President to sign off.
So, the world will not end in August. We will dance this one a few months at a time, because that is the only possible path, given the wildly varying premises that they approach this with.
The big decisions will be made by the people who get sent to D.C. in November 2012, and that is as it should be. I think Obama got handed a bunch of Tea Partiers in 2010 because the people were telling him they were worried about his governing style, and his answer has been to double down. Clinton bent in 1995 because he knew it was his best path to another four years.
At this point, I don't know if Obama has any advisors who he defers to. That will be part of his undoing.
What comes after that? I'll try to pound that one out tomorrow.