Lather, rinse, repeat

Krugman

President Obama has made it clear that he’s willing to sign on to a deficit-reduction deal that consists overwhelmingly of spending cuts, and includes draconian cuts in key social programs, up to and including a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. These are extraordinary concessions. As The Times’s Nate Silver points out, the president has offered deals that are far to the right of what the average American voter prefers — in fact, if anything, they’re a bit to the right of what the average Republican voter prefers!

Yet Republicans are saying no. Indeed, they’re threatening to force a U.S. default, and create an economic crisis, unless they get a completely one-sided deal. And this was entirely predictable.

First of all, the modern G.O.P. fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of a Democratic presidency — any Democratic presidency. We saw that under Bill Clinton, and we saw it again as soon as Mr. Obama took office.

There was an opportunity at the very beginning of the Obama administration for the new President with his large congressional majorities and significant electoral mandate to break this cycle.

During the stimulus debate, when, as Krugman points out, the memory of the political dynamic that existed during the Clinton years should have made the situation easy to read, and when the Republicans made it clear they were going to persist in their desire to function as the Groucho Caucus, there was an opportunity to just tell them to STFU for once. But instead the President then, as now, bent over backwards to compromise when no compromise was either necessary or even invited by the other side who carried on with the same song and dance they're doing now.



The result was a crappy stimulus plus Republican political points. The same storyline played out during the health care fight. The same thing is happening now.

And I can guarantee that the next cycle of Democratic politics will bring admonitions from the punditry that what we really need is a President who is willing to "reach across the aisle" to "get things done" because nobody ever learns anything.