New York Times Hits Obama for Hyperpartisanship, Inadequate Kowtowing to Deficit Commission. No, Seriously.
by David Atkins
The Times just came out with its first article in a series called A Measure of Change, supposedly dedicated to assessing President Obama's record. The first article is a masterpiece of of the Church of High Broderism, a four page hit piece on the president painting the Bowles-Simpson commissioners as heroes, calling the deficit "perhaps the nation's biggest problem," and Paul Ryan as a good-faith player who fell victim to the President's hyperpartisan approach.
The entire piece is written in tragic undertones, as if all the benevolent efforts to ignore unemployment while cutting spending to decrease the deficit were stymied by unfortunate circumstances and nasty partisanship that sadly undercut the most holy work in American politics.
Any random paragraph sampling is enough to make an honest and sane person howl. Consider this:
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But the downsides for Mr. Obama have become clear. His partisan turn undercuts a central promise of his 2008 campaign, to rise above the rancor. And by neither embracing Bowles-Simpson nor explaining his objections and quickly offering an alternative, Mr. Obama arguably failed to show leadership on perhaps the country’s biggest problem. This month, in a New York Times/CBS News poll, 59 percent of Americans disapproved of his handling of the deficit.
Or this:
After a golf game in June, Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner began secret talks.
In a few weeks, they seemed within a handshake of a potentially historic deal. Mr. Obama offered more than ever before, including changes in the Social Security cost-of-living formula and slowly raising Medicare’s eligibility age to 67, an idea that went beyond Bowles-Simpson. Mr. Boehner would support $800 billion in 10-year revenues.
But in a drama that transfixed the world amid threats of an American default, the talks collapsed, revived and finally died.
The Times knows what dirty hippie bloggers haven't figured out: the threat of default wasn't a hostage-taking con game set up by Republicans, but rather a true possibility created by hyperpartisan intransigence against reaching a nice Grand Bargain. They don't need evidence for that assertion, of course; it just feels right, and allows the authors to stand above the nasty partisan fray, demanding austerity of all the greedy little people.
And then, of course, there's poor little victim Paul Ryan:
“My naïveté was thinking, O.K., we’ll put our budget out there first and then he’ll loosen up and start coming to us and we’ll really start talking,” Mr. Ryan recalled. “And what we got was the back of his hand.”
Mr. Ryan bolted from the hall after the speech. Mr. Sperling ran after him to explain that the Obama team had not known he would attend and had not set him up to witness the attack. “You just poisoned the well,” Mr. Ryan snapped.
Mr. Obama, now hopeful, aides said, that he had set the stage for compromise, met the next day with Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson. Both had been in the audience. “What did you think?” he asked, according to Mr. Simpson. “I thought it was harsh,” Mr. Bowles said.
“I didn’t think I was,” Mr. Obama replied.
“I thought it was like inviting a guy to his own hanging,” Mr. Simpson said.
But the authors still hold out desperate hope that welfare queen Medicare recipients will get what's coming to them in Obama's second term:
Since then, in speeches around the country, Mr. Obama has emphasized job-creation spending and tax cuts more than deficit reduction. Gone from his still-pending legislation are some of the concessions he offered Mr. Boehner — presumably in reserve for the elusive grand bargain.
At their recent lunch, Mr. Obama assured Mr. Bowles he would not give up. Mr. Bowles said the president talked of seeing “a real opportunity” for compromise after the election, when Republicans will be eager to avoid the expiration of Bush tax cuts and automatic cuts in military spending — suggesting another chance for a deal inspired by Bowles-Simpson.
“To see his commitment,” Mr. Bowles said, “gave me real hope.”
All mockery aside, the article does have one use value beyond serving as an ipecac substitute. It's a potent reminder that the President, together with Plouffe and Axelrod as political advisers, desperately wanted the Grand Bargain against the better judgment of Democrats with a head on their shoulders:
From the start, some Obama advisers were wary of a commission. But while the administration was consumed in its first year with initiatives that critics would denounce as big-government liberalism — the stimulus package to help revive the economy and the health care law — the president had mused to aides about a bipartisan panel to address the mounting debt. He had inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit for 2009, roughly the size of the 2012 shortfall, and benefits for an aging population soon would increase deficits to unsustainable levels.
In the summer of 2009, he charged economic advisers with researching the history of presidential commissions. Their findings were discouraging: in decades of such panels, only one, the 1983 Greenspan commission to save a bankrupt Social Security system, had produced results.
By 2010, signs of economic recovery alternated with reports of continued high unemployment and home foreclosures. Inside the White House, an intensifying debate over a commission reflected the tension between those seeking continued stimulus, including Lawrence H. Summers, then the senior economic adviser, and those emphasizing deficit reduction, chiefly the former budget director, Peter R. Orszag.
Mr. Orszag argued that forming a panel could buy the administration support for more stimulus measures and time to write a deficit plan. His allies included political advisers David Axelrod and David Plouffe, who saw a commission’s appeal to independent voters.
Mr. Summers had backing from Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who shared others’ concerns that a commission might box the president in with proposals he could not support or pass. Also opposed were legislative aides, who channeled the objections of Congressional Democratic leaders to a panel they could not control.
But the president, by all accounts, still favored the idea, arguing it was the only way to get Republicans to accept tax increases and Democrats to support savings in entitlement programs. Ultimately, the White House was backed into creating a panel: it was the price moderate Democrats exacted to raise the debt limit that winter so the nation could keep borrowing to pay its bills.
Alarmingly, it would seem that Larry Summers and Tim Geithner were among the few voices of reason arguing against this foolishness, but were overwhelmed by the President himself, flanked by Orszag, Axelrod and Plouffe.
That's terrifying and depressing.
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