Tag Archives: Obama

Your 2012 Deep Background Briefing

December 12, 2011 – 1:48 pm

2012 is an unusual election year. Some elections revolve around a single issue: 1860 was about slavery, 1932 about the Depression. 2002 (and to a lesser extent 2004) was about terrorism. 2006 was about the Iraq War. 2010 was about rising government spending and debt.

Some elections, particularly re-elections of incumbent presidents, are ratifications of a general direction, like Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign from 1984 or the Democratic landslides of 1964 and 1936.

There’s always a chance that an emergency will take over an election.  No matter what anybody had planned in 2008, everything changed when the economy started collapsing in late September. Obama probably would have won anyway, but the election turned into a landslide because the country wanted a calm voice and a steady hand. McCain’s “maverick” image was suddenly exactly wrong.

Barring an emergency, 2012 is about a mood: anxiety.

Obviously, President Obama can’t run a ratification campaign in a year when there is a large and growing sense that the country is on the wrong track. But at the same time, this isn’t an issue election. Unemployment, inequality, debt, corruption, national security, health care, climate change, moral decay, and so on are all serious concerns for many voters, but in 2012 they are mainly screens onto which to project a much more diffuse fear that our country is broken — that whatever the issue, we are no longer capable even of grappling with it, much less solving it.

By its nature, anxiety is full of contradictory impulses: Any program that isn’t radical seems like re-arranging the Titanic’s deck chairs, but any particular radical change seems like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. We want a hero to ride in and save us, and yet we are cynical about heroes on horseback. We look back fondly to a brighter, more confident era, and yet we resonate with Jack Burden’s cynical challenge to a nostalgic Anne Stanton in the classic political novel All the King’s Men:

What you mean is that it was a fine, beautiful time back then, but I mean that if it was such a God-damned fine, beautiful time, why did it turn into this time which is not so damned fine and beautiful if there wasn’t something in that time which wasn’t fine and beautiful? Answer that one.

Parties. An anxiety election is an opportunity for the party out of power, but which party is that?

A Democrat is president, but Republicans control the House and have the Senate blocked up with filibusters. An activist Republican majority on the Supreme Court keeps inventing new rights for corporations. Several swing states went Republican in 2010, and the radical programs of the new governors are wildly unpopular.

What makes Americans most anxious is that no one seems to have power. We spent the summer agonizing about the debt ceiling and how to lower the deficit, but in the end that issue got punted to the so-called supercommittee, which deadlocked. Neither party can force its view on the other, yet attempts to compromise also fail.

The Republican presidential opportunity. The challenger has an advantage in an anxiety election, but seizing that advantage requires threading a needle. You have to be on both sides of several contradictions: You are an outsider, but you are experienced; you’re a scrapper who will do whatever it takes to win, but you don’t fight dirty; you’re uncompromising but not rigid; principled but pragmatic; radical but not dangerous; able to get something done in Washington, but not willing to play the old game.

A Republican wins the presidency in November if he (we’ll ignore Michele Bachmann) represents Do Something Different and makes Obama represent Keep Doing What We’re Doing. That vague referendum would be a landslide for Do Something Different.

So the ideal Republican message would create the illusion of specificity without actually being specific. It could embrace a subtly self-contradictory slogan (like Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” from 2000) and embody vague themes (like the Hope and Change of Obama’s 2008 campaign). The perfect message would resemble Nixon’s in 1968: He confidently claimed to have a plan to get us out of Vietnam, but had reasons for not revealing its details.

That’s basically what worked in 2010: Republicans promised to “cut spending” without saying which spending. They implied that the federal budget was full of bridges-to-nowhere that could be eliminated without hurting anybody, but didn’t have to identify them.

Unfortunately for Republican candidates, that perfect November message flops completely in the primaries. The party is firmly in the hands of its radical base, to whom even the Republican establishment represents Keep Doing What We’re Doing.

The base is afraid of compromise and wants to nail candidates down on specifics. So it’s not enough to endorse a theme like traditional American values; a candidate has to oppose same-sex marriage and gays in the military. He can’t just be religious, he has to be a strong Christian who wants kids in the public schools to pray and learn creationism. Environmental pragmatism and balancing short-term economic interests against long-term environmental harm — that’s not good enough. The candidate must promise to abolish the EPA and agree that climate change is a scam.

Social Security and Medicare are so complicated that they are perfect for a Nixonian I-have-a-plan claim, but even Mitt Romney has been driven to endorse Paul Ryan’s voucher system for Medicare.

The Republican base is showing its own symptoms of anxiety. Again and again they have jumped at the vague idea of a hero on horseback, but then been disappointed when they tore into the details of the person and the plan. As long as Rick Perry was “the Jobs Governor” or Herman Cain was an inspirational biography plus a 9-9-9 plan, they rode high. Closer inspection has been fatal to both.

How Obama Can Win. Obama’s calm manner is well suited to an anxiety election, but it won’t be enough, even if his opponent looks scary. Even a radical challenger (like Reagan) could win in a year with a big wrong-path majority (like 1980).

Usually, though, an incumbent president facing a big wrong-path majority also faces a damaging primary campaign, like Carter’s against Ted Kennedy in 1980 or Johnson’s against Gene McCarthy in 1968. But not this year. The Left hasn’t been happy with Obama (see my own Barack, Can We Talk?), but after seeing the Tea Party governors like Scott Walker, few liberals are willing to risk helping the Republicans win the presidency.

Ditto for liberal third-party challengers like Nader in 2000 or Henry Wallace in 1948. Even those of us who lament the corrupting influence of Goldman Sachs or how many War-on-Terror abuses Obama has ratified — we can’t claim that it makes no difference which party wins.

So even if the Left is not happy, it will be united and even motivated in the fall.

Assuming a less-than-perfect Republican challenger, Obama’s winning message has these pieces.

1. I’ve done more than you think. The model here is an op-ed in Tuesday’s LA Times, in which a woman apologizes to President Obama for turning against him.

I’m sorry I didn’t do enough of my own research to find out what promises the president has made good on. I’m sorry I didn’t realize that he really has stood up for me and my family, and for so many others like us.

The reason? She was diagnosed with breast cancer and discovered that the Affordable Care Act makes it possible for her to get health insurance. Pre-ACA, she would have been uninsurable and might well have lost everything.

For decades, health care has been like the weather — everybody talked about it, but nobody succeeded in doing anything. You could wish for more or better than the ACA, but against the alternative of continuing to do nothing (and all the Republican proposals amount to doing nothing), ObamaCare looks pretty good. Voters may have hated the horse-trading process of passing the ACA, but they will love the personal stories of the people it is already helping.

In foreign policy, Obama ended our combat mission in Iraq and finally nailed Osama bin Laden. He helped the Libyans overthrow Gaddafi on their own and didn’t involve us in another Iraq-style mess. The trump card of Bush defenders was always to say, “He kept us safe” after 9-11. Well, we’ve been equally safe under Obama.

Obama gets his lowest marks on the economy, but even there he looks good if you remember just how bad things were when he took office. Expect to see more of this graph:

2. I’m on your side. Preventing big cuts in Social Security and Medicare, wanting to raise taxes on millionaires — people support that stuff. It’s going to help a lot that swing states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida have seen how Republican governors grind down the working class and favor the wealthy.

3. You like me. Even surveys that show a low job-approval rating show that people like Obama personally. The Republican base — the folks who forward emails about his Kenyan birth and his Muslim faith — want to see red-meat attacks against him. But swing voters don’t.

4. I’m running against Congress. This was the Truman strategy in 1948. Obama’s approval ratings hover in the 40s, but Congress’ are in the teens. And if voters blame Congressional Republicans for the gridlock in Washington, then Obama becomes the do-something-different candidate.

5. My plans are better than their plans. This is where the Republican’s nomination battle is going to work against them. If Obama can make the Republican candidate stand for the specific policies he endorsed to get nominated, rather than Do Something Different, he’ll win.

A lot of moderates who aren’t usually single-issue voters will discover that certain Republican positions are deal-breakers. Can you really vote for a candidate who wants to do nothing about global warming? Or roll back gay rights that already exist and don’t seem to be hurting anybody? Or take away collective bargaining rights? Undo child labor laws? Automatically treat Hispanics or Muslims like suspects? Define a fertilized ovum as a person, which turns a doctor-patient discussion of abortion into a murder conspiracy? Or privatize Social Security and replace Medicare with a voucher program?

How far do they go? A lot hinges on how long the Republican nomination stays in doubt, and how far right the nominee has to go. Their ideal winning scenario — that an early consensus would form around a candidate with an ambiguous record like Romney’s — is already not happening.  If candidates are still competing for Tea Party votes in April and May, they’ll have a hard time coming back to get moderate votes in November.

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Barack, Can We Talk?

August 29, 2011 – 9:51 am

It’s me. I’m here in the Democratic base. It’s been a little testy between your people and my people lately, and I’m concerned that things might get out of hand. Worse, I worry that you don’t understand why.

It’s not that we don’t understand how government works, or that democracy runs on compromise. And it’s not that we thought you were some kind of messiah, who could turn the country around just by pointing in a new direction. (That slam on us was originally a Republican talking point, remember?)

Let me try to explain how it looks from our point of view.

You know I wouldn’t use George W. Bush as an example unless I were desperate, right? Well, in 2005 Bush went all out promoting his Social Security privatization plan. Bankruptcy, personal accounts, blah, blah, blah.

The country hated it. So what did Bush do next? He could have decided that (having put so much effort into raising the issue) he had to “get something done”. That would require Democratic support, so he could have adopted a Democratic idea, like extending Social Security taxes to all wages rather than just the first $100K or so.

And then he could have sold the “compromise” package to the public by adopting Democratic rhetoric — maybe by pointing out how well the wealthiest Americans had done over the past 20 years, and how this bill was just asking them to “give something back” for all the benefits the American economy had given them.

Can’t picture it, can you? Me either — and that’s the point. Dumb as he was, President Bush understood two important things:

  • The Republican Party stands for something. You can’t take any old idea and call it “Republican” without screwing up the brand.
  • The political struggle isn’t just about writing laws, it’s about defining reality. Republican success rests on a collection of public misconceptions and faulty frames. As long as the public believes that stuff, they win.

Brands. Every Republican candidate starts every campaign with an advantage: All he has to do is say “Joe Shmoe, conservative Republican” and everybody knows who he is and what he stands for. Low taxes, less regulation, militarism, traditional social values — love that image or hate it, we all recognize it.

Democrats, on the other hand, have to establish themselves. That takes time and money, and it makes us vulnerable to mud-slinging and swift-boating.

Branding has to start at the top, and Democratic leaders haven’t been up to the job for decades now. Every time a Democratic president sounds like he’s making up his mind on the fly, we’re that much further away from having an effective Democratic brand.

Reality. Listen to the Republican presidential candidates: Global warming isn’t real. Spending cuts create jobs. Rich people are job creators. The unemployed are lazy. Unions hurt working people. Government can’t create jobs. All government spending is waste. The minimum wage is too high. The stimulus failed. Protecting the environment is a luxury we can’t afford. Roads, schools, and parks are luxuries we can’t afford. Medical care for the old and poor is a luxury we can’t afford.

That’s the sound of reality being defined. When we take on issues one at a time, we fight on a terrain Republicans have been shaping for decades. That’s why Bush never adopted Democratic rhetoric, and why it kills us when Republican rhetoric comes out of your mouth.

What we need from our Democratic president isn’t just a few more dollars for infrastructure or the unemployed, we need a defense of reality.

Compromising without fighting. Sure, Congress needs to pass budgets, and you have to compromise with Republicans to do that. But again and again, the Republicans remain faithful to their vision and you come out of the compromise owning the package. If the result turns out to be inadequate in some way, the public thinks the alternative is to do what the Republicans wanted.

Look at health care: Every real Democrat knows that the right answer is single-payer. It works in Europe. It’s cheaper and delivers better care. Sure, you couldn’t have gotten that through Congress. I know. I understand. But because you never proposed it, Democrats had no platform for talking about it. The compromise that came out of Congress is now ObamaCare (even though it’s based on the Mitt Romney/Heritage Foundation plan in Massachusetts), and the only alternative the public knows about is the Republican do-nothing plan.

Look at the stimulus. Liberal economists said it needed to be bigger and have less tax cuts. But because you never proposed that, the compromise that came out of Congress is the Obama stimulus. Here’s what Paul Krugman predicted in March, 2009:

It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed.

But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts. And as a result, the recession rages on, unchecked.

The problem is not that you compromise, it’s that you compromise without fighting. The public never sees the liberal alternative, so whatever passes becomes the leftmost edge of the possible.

Repeating false rhetoric. The reality-battlefield that we’re losing worst on is economics.

To you and me, it’s obvious that the economy has a demand problem: Businesses aren’t hiring because they have no customers. Give them a tax break, let them endanger their workers or dump more chemicals in the groundwater — and they still won’t have any customers, so they still won’t hire.

In these situations, government needs to create demand by spending. We have unemployed people, work that needs doing (bridges to rebuild, an electric grid that badly needs an upgrade), and investors willing to lend the government money at interest rates lower than inflation. It’s a no-brainer: Borrow the money to hire the people to do the work.

You know why we can’t mobilize public support behind that program? Because conservatives have convinced large chunks of the public to frame the problem wrong. The worst frame out there is the government/family analogy: Families have to cut back in hard times, so government should have to cut back too.

You know that’s nutty. Just like Joseph told Pharaoh, government has to save when everyone else is spending and spend when everyone else is saving. So why do you say things like this?

Families across this country understand what it takes to manage a budget. Well, it’s time Washington acted as responsibly as our families do.

And why did you frame the debt-ceiling negotiations purely in deficit-reduction terms, as if job-creation wasn’t an issue?

Another false Republican frame is that businesses aren’t hiring because they lack “confidence”. They then link doubt to debt, and so justify the crazy idea that we can create jobs by cutting spending. This kind of nonsense needs to be called out at every turn.

Instead, a White House spokesman

repeatedly said that deficit-reduction was crucial in generating economic confidence. Confidence—he repeated this word many times.

What Democrats need from you. We need you to be a reality warrior. We need you and your whole administration to resist false Republican frames and never to lose sight of Democratic ideals, even when there is no clear path to implementing them.

If you have to compromise for the good of the country, compromise. But Republicans can’t make you adopt their rhetoric, no matter how many seats they have in Congress. Hold them responsible for their part of every compromise — by refusing to stop talking about what you would do if they would let you.

Don’t embrace the compromises, because that lets Republicans make their trade-offs for free: Every bit of deficit reduction costs jobs. Make them own that.

Talk about this: Full employment. Single-payer health care. Clean energy. Racial justice. Carbon reduction. Smart electric grid. Efficient mass transit. Education and opportunity for everyone.

Maybe we don’t see how to implement it all right now, but we should never lose sight of it. If not this year, next year. If not this decade, next decade. Don’t tell us we can’t.

Yes we can.

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Horse Race 2012

August 22, 2011 – 12:13 pm

I’m usually reluctant to write about the presidential horserace, because it already gets over-covered in the corporate media, at the expense of covering who the candidates are and what they propose to do.

On the other hand, the media also tends to get the horse race wrong, which tempts me to comment. Recently, for example, pundits have been analyzing “what went wrong” with Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy, never admitting that it was a mistake to give him so much coverage in the first place. In truth, they could just as fruitfully analyze what went wrong with your candidacy or mine, since neither of us is going to be president either.

(I wrote about Pawlenty because his campaign videos illustrated an important propaganda technique.)

So (with proper apologies and promises of future restraint) I’m going to plunge into some horserace coverage about the 2012 election.

President Obama. President Obama’s job approval rating hit an all-time low of 40% this week. Still, he is polling well — or at least not badly — against his potential 2012 opponents: In three states a Republican challenger needs to win — North Carolina, Ohio, and Colorado — Obama is “edging Mitt Romney and keeping clear leads on the rest of the field”.

So Obama’s approval-rating slump seems less of a personal rejection than a symptom of a general wave of pessimism with the economy and disgust with American politics following the debt-ceiling debacle. Things are bad and the President seems to have no solution, but neither does anybody else.

Nate Silver (who I consider the best poll interpreter in the country) is struck more by the breadth of Obama’s slump than its size. During 2011 his approval rating has fallen among all income groups and in all regions of the country; among whites, blacks, and Hispanics; among conservative Republicans as well as liberal Democrats.

The drop among liberal Democrats is fairly small — about 3% — something you would never guess from progressive blogs like Hullabaloo. Nate sums up like this:

Although many leading liberal voices were unhappy with the debt ceiling deal that Mr. Obama struck with Republicans this month (justifiably, in my view), this just isn’t showing up in a big way among the liberal rank-and-file.

One thing to keep in mind is that if most liberal Democrats had strongly approved of Mr. Obama’s performance before, then a “downgrade” in their views of him might be toward less enthusiastic approval, rather than to outright disapproval. Although these liberal Democrats might not vote against Mr. Obama, less enthusiastic support could translate into reduced turnout, volunteerism and fund-raising for the president’s re-election campaign.

Count me among that number. I’ve gone from an enthusiastic Obama supporter to someone who says “at least he’s not batshit crazy”.

The Republican Savior Search. Republicans are currently going through what Democrats suffered in 2004, when Bush seemed beatable, but we lurched from one “savior” to the next because we just couldn’t find the right person to run against him. Howard Dean was going to save us, and then he wasn’t. Wesley Clark was popular until the exact moment he entered the race, and then we started longing for Hillary Clinton or Al Gore.

This year, Rick Perry is playing the Wesley Clark role. He was supposed to be the answer for Republicans who think that Michele Bachmann is unelectable (like Howard Dean), Mitt Romney is too establishment and too phony (like John Kerry), and (in spite of previous boomlets for Donald Trump and Herman Cain) everybody else just seems too small or too boring.

Then Rick ruined it all by announcing his candidacy. Suddenly he was every bit as crazy as Bachmann, a corrupt crony capitalist, a Shariah sympathizer, a porno investor, “an idiot“, a proponent of “big government overreach” and somehow simultaneously “the second coming of George Bush” and at war with the former Bushies. [In fairness: Think Progress explains why the porno charge is overblown.]

So now Republicans daydream of new saviors: Jeb Bush, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan.

The Republican problem in a nutshell is that no actual candidate polls as well against Obama as the generic Republican. This is similar to the phenomenon that generic spending cuts are popular, while specific cuts aren’t. The generic Republican candidate runs on a generic platform that cuts spending without cutting anything important. Actual candidates have to be more specific.

The path to beating Obama is clear: He’s vulnerable on the economy, which everybody is disappointed in. The Republican candidate needs to talk about creating jobs while obscuring the fact that none of the Republican ideas created jobs when President Bush tried them. That’s why I was briefly worried when Perry cast himself as “the jobs governor”. The we-did-it-in-Texas message is deceptive, but it could fly.

The Republican problem is to get a candidate nominated without taking far-outside-the-mainstream positions, particularly on social issues. You can’t run against the gays any more. Prayer is good, but urging the public to pray for rain is wacky (especially if God turns you down). And abortions are strangely like guns: Most Americans think there are too many of them, but they still want their family to be able to get one as a last resort.

Other red-meat conservative issues fail nationally, too. People may not want to make big sacrifices to avoid global warming, but Perry’s scientists-are-frauds claim or Bachmann’s promise to “lock the doors” and “turn off the lights” at the EPA are going to scare more people than they attract. Illegal immigration worries many whites, but Republicans can’t win without at least 1/3 of the Hispanic vote.

So a winning Republican needs to wink-and-nod to the extremists while not scaring everybody else. Only Romney (OK, Huntsman also, for all his chances are worth) is trying to walk that line, and I think he could beat Obama if things continue to look bad economically. But the only way he wins the nomination is if Perry, Bachmann and maybe Palin split the wacko vote in the primaries.

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Is Obama on our side?

July 11, 2011 – 1:31 pm

When Barack Obama’s 2008 landslide carried such unlikely states as North Carolina and Indiana, and swept in large majorities in Congress, many progressives imagined a transformational presidency like FDR’s. Katrina Vanden Heuval wrote:

[F]uture historians may well view Barack Obama’s victory as the end of the age of Reagan and the beginning of something substantially new.

So far, it hasn’t worked out that way.

Not that President Obama hasn’t had accomplishments. The Bush economic crisis did not become a second Great Depression, as it threatened to do. With all its compromises, the Affordable Care Act is still a historic step in the right direction. Obama’s two appointments have slowed down the rightward drift of the Supreme Court. In thousands of ways that don’t make headlines, regulatory agencies have gone back to protecting the American people. On gay rights, President Obama has not led, but at least he has not stood in the way. The Iraq War has continued to wind down, our relations with other nations in general are less belligerent, and we finally nailed Osama Bin Laden.

That’s not nothing. But by now the list of liberal disappointments has gotten long.

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe.

  • No public option. Given the public option’s popularity, a great speech might have made a difference to wavering Democrats in the Senate, but Obama didn’t give one.
  • Ratifying Bush’s power grabs. On Inauguration Day, the new president had a chance to define the Bush administration as an aberration and turn the corner. Obama could even have enforced the law and prosecuted Bush officials for ordering torture. Instead, he let his initial effort to close Guantanamo fail, and has continued to practice and has systematically defended in court many of the Bush administration abuses of power.
  • Afghanistan. To be fair, Candidate Obama portrayed Afghanistan as the good war that got ignored because we fought the bad war in Iraq. So Afghan escalation shouldn’t have been a surprise. But we still have no coherent goal or exit strategy.
  • Libya. Again: goal? exit strategy? By ignoring the War Powers Act — in defiance of the advice of his own top lawyers — he’s expanded executive power beyond even Bush.
  • Global warming. In a recent article in Rolling Stone, Al Gore credits Obama for at least starting to take action, but then says:

President Obama has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change. After successfully passing his green stimulus package, he did nothing to defend it when Congress decimated its funding. After the House passed cap and trade, he did little to make passage in the Senate a priority. Senate advocates — including one Republican — felt abandoned when the president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that “drill, baby, drill” is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.

  • Taxes. When Republicans wouldn’t extend the Bush tax cuts just for the middle class, Obama had a perfect place to make a popular stand. Imagine: “I wanted to keep your taxes low, but the Republicans blocked me to protect the millionaires.” Instead he agreed to extend all the Bush cuts — and didn’t even get a debt-ceiling increase written into the deal.

And now, he seems ready to make significant concessions on Social Security and Medicare in those debt-ceiling negotiations he might have avoided. Like the public option only moreso, Social Security and Medicare are popular. There’s a significant rabble waiting to be roused, if a silver-tongued president were so inclined. So far, nothing.

Explanations. In the beginning, progressives explained these disappointments with some combination of 1) He’s doing the best he can given political reality and the power of the special interests and 2) He’s a bad negotiator who compromises when he doesn’t have to. Lately, though, a third explanation is getting louder and louder: 3) Maybe he’s not really on our side.

Bringing up Explanation 3 — even to deny it — is the surest way to start a blood feud on a liberal web site like Daily Kos. Emotions run high. Some liberals feel strongly that Obama has betrayed them, while others are just as strongly attached to him.

The problem is: All three explanations work, and each explains things the others can’t. For example, I think Obama was genuinely surprised by the popular resistance Republicans raised to closing Guantanamo. (Scary, scary terrorists were going to be housed in flimsy jails down the street from you.) Otherwise, why make a grand promise only to back off of it? And I believe he did (foolishly) expect Republicans to negotiate in good faith on vital issues like the debt ceiling.

True intentions. In spite of all the socialist and Marxist and big spender rhetoric from the Right, what if Obama has always been a centrist? Left and Right alike imagined that the centrist positions he campaigned on were masking a deeper progressive agenda, but what if they weren’t?

From the beginning, the role Obama has written for himself has been to let liberals and conservatives fight it out in Congress, and then to come in at the end with a compromise. (The problem has been that liberals are largely shut out of the corporate media — when was the last time you saw Dennis Kucinich on TV? — so the public debate has been between the most moderate Democrats and the most conservative Republicans, with Obama coming in at the end to make a center-right compromise rather than a left-right compromise.)

I think the way he has handled entitlement reform tells us a lot. The Simpson-Bowles Commission Obama appointed to study long-term deficit issues was stacked from the beginning. (Digby kept calling it “the Catfood Commission”.) When the commission was appointed, Unsilent Generation posted:

Despite protestations to the contrary, the commission exists primarily to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The commission’s slant is evident from the choice of its two co-chairs: former Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson, a long-time foe of entitlements, and Erskine Bowles, the middle-right former Clinton chief of staff.

It should have surprised no one when Simpson called Social Security “a milk cow with 310 million tits“. And it should have surprised no one that the Commission recommended Social Security and Medicare cuts.

Presidents do this kind of spadework to cover unpopular actions they want to take later. It’s where you can see presidential intention in its purest form. Obama has believed all along that Social Security and Medicare need to be cut. So while he’s not likely to get on board with the Ryan privatization plan, he’s also not likely to make a bold stand against cuts that he’s been maneuvering towards from the beginning.

Framing is another place you can see presidential intention at work. The other side can force you to accept deals you don’t like, but they can’t make you repeat their deceptive rhetoric. Recently, though, Obama has said things like:

Government has to start living within its means, just like families do.  We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs

Paul Krugman comments:

That’s three of the right’s favorite economic fallacies in just two sentences. No, the government shouldn’t budget the way families do; on the contrary, trying to balance the budget in times of economic distress is a recipe for deepening the slump. Spending cuts right now wouldn’t “put the economy on sounder footing.” They would reduce growth and raise unemployment. And last but not least, businesses aren’t holding back because they lack confidence in government policies; they’re holding back because they don’t have enough customers — a problem that would be made worse, not better, by short-term spending cuts.

My conclusion. Consider the possibility that Obama is a Clintonian centrist whose liberal actions have been forced on him by events. I don’t think he’s a bad guy or a traitor to the cause. I just don’t think he’s ever been a progressive.

Deep down, I think Obama wants to be the president who steers the center course — fixing the long-term growth in entitlement spending without gutting the safety net. The ACA is part of that vision, because health-care inflation is the main long-term fiscal threat, and the private sector is never going to stop it. The near-depression forced a half-hearted stimulus on him, but expanding government services is not his fundamental inclination.

He never said it was.

Conservative columnist Ross Douhat on the deficit negotiations: “The not-so-secret secret is that the White House has given ground on purpose.”

Rick Perlstein was all over this more than a year ago.

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