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Tuesday, April 12, 2011

What, Me Worry? Wednesday's Speech Will Set the Tone for Obama's Campaign and Hence A Whole Year's Public Discourse

Steve Benen gently proposes "it's time to revisit the assumption that the Obama White House got rolled" on the last-second budget deal of days past, since upon closer examination it appears that "a lot of the cuts related to money that wasn't going to be spent (leftover Census money, for example), eliminating programs that were set to expire, and not repeating expenditures intended to be one-time infusions anyway."

In other words, Obama let the GOP fulminate dramatically while his own technocrats tinkered around the edges to ensure best-possible outcomes under cover of all the crazytown atmospherics. Also, Obama's rising approval numbers and Boehner's plummeting numbers suggest that Obama read feckless independents correctly this time around and also that Boehner's fractious caucus really won't be satisfied with anything less than apocalypse (an outcome which wouldn't satisfy them remotely as much as they think it would, hence the caucus is pretty much unsatisfiable on principle).

I can't say that any of this is particularly surprising. Obama has always been consummately good at such delicate maneuverings. Given the context in which Obama found his way to this outcome, however, that is to say, given the actual realities of widespread misery, consolidating wealth disparity, a liquidity trap, media distortions of fact, a GOP captured by its most reactionary elements, well, it is hard to find anything to cheer in such an outcome, whatever the effort and skill to which it testifies.

It's likely that a hard line on raising the debt ceiling creates a game of chicken from which Democrats can only win and Republicans can only lose, and so the fiscal and political ends align sufficiently serendipitously -- not to mention that corporate-military GOP funding teats are among those who would suffer conspicuously from failure to raise the debt ceiling and so I just don't believe they will bite however idiotically they bark on this one -- that I am less worried right now about how that is going to play out, even if a bad outcome really would be calamitously bad (none of which is to deny that Democrats can still easily snatch defeat from the jaws of ready victory in any case, it's just to say that there is no reason to expect them to do so until we see actual evidence to that effect).

No, it seems to me that the Obama response to the profoundly cruel, incoherent, polemical budget drawn up by doll-eyed dolt Paul Ryan will be the real battleground in the months to come. Coming on the heels of Obama's announcement of his re-election campaign, the terms on which he fights a budget which Ryan himself has declared the manifesto of a "Cause" will tell us all what we will have to work with between now and November 2012.

It is a truism that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose, and part of the reason this is true is that few are inspired let alone not plain demoralized by prosaic campaigns to infuse them with the kind of energy and imagination that yields victories with legs (not to mention coat-tails). It is also a truism that budgets are moral documents, and to the extent that this is true, the profoundly immoral document that Randroid Paul has delivered to the world calls for a moral response just as ferociously as the location of this speech at the beginning of a new Obama campaign calls for the kind of poetry a moral respond would provide.

Again, it is not surprising that Obama may cunningly win policy skirmishes on the budget deal and on the debt ceiling. But it is crucial to grasp that to win the budget battle with Ryan on such terms (however competent and comfortable he may be on such ground as a sitting President) will not win him the election of which this skirmish is a part.

As progressives at the level of the States are reconnecting the Democratic Party via a defense of organized labor with the politics of the majority of people who work for a living, now is the time for progressives at the level of the National politics of a Presidential campaign to do the same via a moral battle over the GOP budget to punish suffering and vulnerable majorities in order to lard the richest of the rich with ever more wealth and privilege.

Those who are worried about Wednesday's speech are worried that a golden opportunity will be squandered for progressive change in a pre-emptive surrender to phony, immoral, unsound "bipartisanship," and we are worried that an utterly demoralizing tone will be set with which we must all cope for many long months of long days of long hours of effort all to an uncertain outcome in which even victory would feel ambivalent at best.

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