Colossal failure

First read at this deal indicates that the Republicans are the big winners.

This means the legislative politics in America have whipsawed over the course of a year from whether and how to provide universal health care in the United States, to which social programs ought to be cut or annihilated. That the focal point of policy on Capitol Hill is on what should be cut -- and not when to cut, or whether cutting is even wise -- illustrates just how brief the progressive moment lasted after Obama's election in 2008. It also represents a colossal failure of government.

To the extent that the United States does have an immediate fiscal problem, it can be traced to three causes -- two systemic, one acute, and none Obama's fault: Bush tax cuts, unfunded Bush administration spending policies (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Medicare Part D) and plummetting tax revenue following the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession.

These problems helped Obama get elected. They also required him and Democrats, politically, not to let the public forget where the problems came from. When they failed at that, Republicans took an albatross that rested rightly with them and hung it around the Democrats' necks.

That analysis is far too charitable. We didn't elect Obama to "not let the public forget where the problems came from" We elected him to do something about them. At every turn, however, he has failed to do much more than shrug.

That "whipsaw" Beutler refers to didn't happen on its own. It happened because the President squandered his momentum and his mandate early on. The health care debate (if you can call it that) boiled down to a recently defeated Republican party remaining united and resolute that insurance companies remain in charge and the recently sweeping electoral victor President providing zero leadership in counterpoint to that resolution.

Similarly the budget fight appears to have ended in Obama and Reid folding while they still held the best cards. The Republicans would have lost more politically in the event of a shutdown. They should have been the side forced to bend over backward to avoid one. But somehow this President operates under a kind of anti-strategy where no advantage is gone un-squandered. Tonight on the Tweeter Tubes I wondered, as I often do, if they even care. In response at one point I got this.

hard to have a strategy when your party's voters want social spending and your party's bosses want the rich to keep getting richer.

And there's your Democratic party in a nutshell, folks. Are you ready to capture the magic in 2012?

Update: So disgusting

Boehner, of course, could afford to speak plainly. He’d not just won the negotiation but had proved himself in his first major test as speaker of the House. He managed to get more from the Democrats than anyone had expected, sell his members on voting for a deal that wasn’t what many of them wanted and avert a shutdown. There is good reason to think that Boehner will be a much more formidable opponent for Obama than Gingrich was for Clinton.

So why were Reid and Obama so eager to celebrate Boehner’s compromise with his conservative members? The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.