Obama still slaps left in face - #ElizabethWarren #debtshowdown

There's a whole raft of ways in which he's doing this, and to lead off, we have one that has nothing to do with his ongoing debt showdown sellouts.

To wit, Elizabeth Warren is officially off the table to head the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Judging by the story, Obama wants to appoint some mid-level wonkish type who will be as unoffensive as possible to both Congressional Republicans and his own Wall Street friends.

Part of why Warren isn't getting the job? She refuses to go along with Obama's bankster friends, and their friends inside Team Obama, and continues to oppose a toothless settlement of the apparent mortgage fraud problems that have the housing bubble collapse still unsettled.

But, let's get back to that debt issue, though, shall we?

Greg Sargent blogs on Obama's plea to liberals to sign off on cutting the debt. Why? He continues to throw more and more spending cuts into the mix, none of them for things like defense spending, subsidies to big business, etc., and still gets nothing in return. He's like an even-more-naive Reagan.

Obama’s argument is that progressives won’t be able to make the case to the public for more spending unless the deficit is neutralized as an issue. ... Some liberals will respond that this risks ceding the short term argument in advance, with the result that the public never gets to hear the case for running deficits in a bad economy and dealing with them later.

Exactly. Also given the fact that Obama has done little to sell the public on the idea that much of the current high deficit level is not structural but is recession-related tax revenue declines (and, given Obama's increasingly neoconservative turn, one suspects this is deliberate), why should "we" trust him?

Joan Walsh, a reliable semi-Obamaic, chides Obama for believing that slashing now will mean spending more later, citing the example of that great neolib, William Jefferson Clinton.

For a guy whose presidential candidacy was greatly defined by his not being a Clinton, Obama is clearly following the Bill Clinton playbook. Clinton spent his entire political career trying to kill right-wing stereotypes about "big spending" liberals. Not only did he balance the budget to eliminate Ronald Reagan's deficit, he endorsed and enacted a welfare reform plan largely crafted by Republicans. Both bold decisions were supposed to show that Democrats could be trusted to tame the excesses of the Great Society, and usher in an era of smart, pragmatic, humane government that combined private sector discipline with New Deal values. If Clinton could get the issues of welfare and bloated government "off the table," he believed, he could set the table for a progressive agenda.

Had Clinton been right about that, he would have been able to say: “Our fiscal house is in order. ...

Instead, the conciliating Clinton met increasingly savage political opposition ... (a)nd right now, Republicans in Congress are on the verge of sending us back to the 19th. To the extent that Clinton was able to turn back his Republican foes ... and win re-election in 1996, it wasn't because he compromised, but because he had the winds of the economy at his back. (You can argue Clinton's deficit-cutting helped improve the economy, but it certainly didn't turn it around.)

So there is no reason to believe that "getting our fiscal house in order" would vanquish Obama's political enemies and create a mandate for the kind of government spending that would "win the future."

Other than still, even with her caveats, perhaps being too charitable by half to Clinton, Walsh makes valid points re Dear Leader.

Andrew Leonard, meanwhile, notes that even as discussion numbers tighten, Obama will still chase after GOP debt ponies.

Robert Reich, meanwhile, tells Obama to learn something else from Clinton, namely, after the debt showdown, it will still be about the economy, stupid.