Barack Obama, self-diminished at #Debtmageddon

In the New York Times Book Review, ace reporter Elizabeth Drew has a great story about how we have come to the point of a looming Debtmageddon. As an intro, she uses the obvious rhetorical question of "What were they thinking?"

At the same time, she's a bit iffy in spots. She said both Republicans and Democrats expected the other to be more pliable, without noting President Catfood has already practically given away the store, to the ire of many members of his own party and more liberal supporters, especially on things such as entitlements. But she does rightly note that there were divisions within both parties, especially Speaker of the House John Boehner vs. both House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the GOP, and Obama vs. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi among Democrats.

GOP factions within both House and Senate, and different political strategies, are all at stake:

Boehner and Cantor, and also Boehner and McConnell, have had their political differences and conflicting political exigencies. Boehner of course wants to retain Republican control of the House—it’s not inconceivable that the Democrats could pick up the necessary twenty-four seats to recover it. Therefore, Boehner didn’t want his flock to have to cast a controversial vote anytime close to the election. On the other hand, with twenty-three Democratic senators up for reelection, McConnell has had his eye on a Republican takeover of the Senate. His party would need to pick up only four seats. Therefore, he was looking for a way to force a controversial vote closer to the election.

And Democrats not named Obama had their own poltical angles:

Moreover, the Democrats had their own political reasons for opposing reductions in Medicare benefits. They had had great success in campaigning against Paul Ryan’s bizarre proposal, adopted by the House (despite even Boehner’s expressed misgivings), that would turn Medicare into a voucher system.

But, we're not at the meat of the story yet.




That said, the nut grafs aren't until page 2:

The question arises, aside from Obama’s chronically allowing the Republicans to define the agenda and even the terminology (the pejorative word “Obamacare” is now even used by news broadcasters), why did he so definitively place himself on the side of the deficit reducers at a time when growth and job creation were by far the country’s most urgent needs?

It all goes back to the “shellacking” Obama took in the 2010 elections. The President’s political advisers studied the numbers and concluded that the voters wanted the government to spend less. This was an arguable interpretation. Nevertheless, the political advisers believed that elections are decided by middle-of-the-road independent voters, and this group became the target for determining the policies of the next two years.

Drew gets kind of weak again, though. She claims that an April 13 speech marked his move to "fiscal centrism," ignoring things like his agreeing to compromise away the compromise on stimulus spending back in 2009.

But she gets his motives spot on:

In that speech he stated that he wanted to reduce the debt by $4 trillion—thus aligning himself with the Republicans—but also asked for revenues to partly offset that reduction. It was all about reelection politics, designed to appeal to this same group of independents. “And that’s why,” I was told by the person familiar with the White House deliberations, “he went bigger in the deficit reduction talks; bringing in Social Security is consistent with that slice of the electorate they’re trying to reach.” This person said, “There’s a bit of bass-ackwardness to this; the deficit spending you’d want to focus on right now is the jobs issue.”

In essence, per the advice of Obama strategist David Plouffe, Obama has been borrowing from Muhammad Ali's "rope a dope" tricks.

Page 3 plays out the politics more, as well as getting back to the "What were they thinking" rhetorical question. However, Drew again cuts Obama too much slack on negotiations, making him look more a sucker of Republicans rather than a willing player, the man who nominated deficit-slashing entitlement-cutters to his Catfood Commission.

The story is good, but not as good as Krugman touts it as being. Sorry, Paul, but he's not "President Pushover"; try "President Fellow Traveler" instead.