Posted on 12/10/2010 3:20:10 PM PST by Signalman
White House aides are anxious to portray the deal Obama cut with the Republicans over the extension of the Bush tax cuts as a shrewd move to the center. It was nothing of the sort. It was surrender pure and simple.
It was as much of a “compromise” as that reached between Grant and Lee at Appomattox and between Emperor Hirohito and General MacArthur on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945!
When Bill Clinton triangulated, he never abandoned his personal view or his policy preferences. He had always endorsed welfare reform and embraced both the work requirement and the time limit on the dole. He had vetoed previous Republican welfare reform bills because they included Medicaid and food stamp cuts which he has always opposed. When he signed an anti-crime bill, he had always supported GOP positions on the death penalty and truth in sentencing. And when he reached his balanced budget deal, he gave away nothing.
Democrats are right to portray Obama’s compromise as a surrender. He desperately wants to raise taxes on wealthy people, not for the revenue as much as to redistribute income. But he couldn’t do it and gave in.
The Obama surrender over the Bush tax cuts tells us something about the man: He has, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt describing President William McKinley, “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” He blinked over the tax cuts and he will blink again and again and again. He will blink over the debt limit extension. He will blink over bailing out the states from their red ink. He will blink over a balanced budget with no tax increases. He may not blink over defunding Obamacare, but we’ll at least get a wink or two out of him.
If the Democrats do not pass the extension of the Bush tax cuts, it’s no big deal. In fact, its good for the Republicans. They should reconvene on January 2, 2011 and pass the extension on their own. And, while they are at it, they should rescind enough spending to lop off the $100 billion they promised in the election, thus paying for much or all of the extension.
Republicans should not make a big deal over the inheritance tax extension. A $5 million exemption protects 40,000 of the 44,000 estates that will come up for tax next year. The other 4,000 are not worth the fight.
And the GOP should go along with the extension of unemployment benefits. They cannot extend tax cuts on those making more than $250,000 at the same time that they terminate unemployment benefits. They just can’t do it.
Barack Obama is contracting the disease of presidents — the perception of weakness. It almost stopped Bush-41 from getting elected and it almost denied Clinton a second term. He is caught between America’s desire for compromise and its demand for a strong president. If he fails to bring his own party into line behind the extension of the tax cuts, it will send a further signal of weakness. And Americans do not like a weak president.
OK, Dick, you're the pro. But he don't seem like the "surrendering" type to me.
Hirohito was never near the deck of the Missouri in 1945 or in any other year.
He can try to moonwalk away from this, but he's the one seen as waffling.
LOL
He may have surendered but he got 13 months of unemployment welfare payments out of it and a trillion dollars of new spending and lots of subsidies for the ethanol that is stripping our grocery shelves while it ruins our cars.
You’re right.
Dick is all wet on this one.
A few days ago on FR, I referred to this as yet
another example of “internal triangulation”.
Since virtually the beginning of the Obama Administration
a number of high profile Dems, namely Pelosi, Reid, and assorted surrogates, willingly played “bad cop” to Obama’s
“good cop” over a wide variety of Obama policy initiatives.
No one seems to remember this now, but it was all done with a view to laying the foundation of creating in the public mind the notion that Obama was not the hard-core ideologue
that people might take him to be, but instead Pelosi and Reid were.
My feeling is that Obama is still very much “their man”, and this is all a charade to make Obama appear way more
“moderate” than he actually is. There is no way that political operatives like the above-named , tone-deaf as they are, could believe that there’s enough of a hard-left constituency left out there, to be able to appeal to it, and come out the other side (2012) with a net gain to save
their Party by a primary challenge from somebody they’ve determined to be incorruptibly purer from the Progressive perspective, than Obama is. This is a big sham, but lots of people seem to be buying into it, even talking head conservatives like Hannity, etc.
Read Morris’s piece as nothing more than an attempt to buff
up his image as a strategist by distinguishing HIS particular brand of ‘triangulation’, of which he was the primary ‘architect’ for Clinton, from the current new form of what I called
internal triangulation. Morris has found yet another way to
bring himself to the forefront, and remind all of us of his great contributions to political strategizing.
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