Well, here’s where I think your assumptions are a bit off; Obama didn’t let the Republicans tie the debt ceiling to deficit reduction. The House Republicans (Tea Party caucus) decided to make the routine task of raising the debt limit contingent on deficit reduction, even at the cost of a default. Once they’d done this, Obama had the choice of either insisting those issues be decoupled or negotiating in terms of deficit reduction. The first course has decades of history and common sense to back it up, but has a fatal flaw (fatal to Obama, as I’ll explain below). The second course allows the GOP to distract efforts away from stimulative policy & job creation, but was a detour Obama could shorten considerably if he was patient, determined and smarter than his opposition. (I’ll also explain this below.)
The problem here is that the Tea Party had already demagogued the hell out of the debt ceiling. Even now, after months of news coverage and several dozen cogent print explanations of what a “debt ceiling” is, most of the country still thinks it’s permission to borrow more money from furriners and spend it on turtle sex research and condoms for junkies.
Hell, even Obama demagogued the issue as a Senator; if he’d taken a hard line on a clean bill, yes he’d have gotten it in the end, but not until he’d been successfully portrayed as a head-in-the-sand, free-spending failure, ignoring the country’s WORST DEBT CRISIS ever so he could ram socialist muslim gummint down our collective throats. He would’ve been drawn as the dangerous extremist holding the country hostage to an ideology, and the Pubbies would’ve heroically saved us from default and cried from now 'til November 2012 about the mean irresponsible black man who refuses to compromise and spends all our tax money.
Well, here’s what we know about Obama the community organizer.
a) he’s always been a pragmatist in pursuit of broad progressive goals,
b) he prefers consensus action, and
c) he takes the long view, usually well beyond anyone else at the table.
Here Obama has managed to work an intractable House majority into a position where they’ve not gotten any of their major demands, they’ve not forced him to abandon any of his own conditions, and they’ve signed off on a plan which scuttles their ability to exploit the debt ceiling for political leverage until after the next election. Further, all the Democratic “sacred cows” the President offered up for sacrifice are protected well beyond the next election as well, and a few of the GOP cows are looking at substantial cuts - Defense spending in particular.
And the POTUS achieved this with his hands tied behind his back-- as you say:
And any real attention to job creation was just a campaign slogan, immediately discarded by the GOP to pursue their single agenda of anti-Obamaism. In that context, with intransigent foes who want to terminate his presidency with extreme prejudice, with a country convinced through media saturation that austerity is the answer to our economic woes, Obama the pragmatist has to follow the Tea Party into the wilderness if he wants to lead us out.
Somehow, he finagled a deal which saves the hostage, only reduces spending by a few tens of billions (a drop in the budget bucket) over the next two years, requires the focus for further deficit reduction to be balanced between spending cuts (that are half defense spending) and revenue (including final expiration of the Bush tax cuts), and calls for general spending “caps” which are easily reversible and specifically exempt those New Deal and Great Society programs the neocons hate so much. Hidden in the details is the “deem and pass” for the budget so that there’ll be no distracting fight and government shutdown in September.
It was interesting to me to listen to the President’s comments immediately upon the bill’s passage in the Senate. I noticed he focused clearly and lucidly on job creation through government spending, but he never even used the word “spending” in his description. He wants to “unite” small and large contractors with existing infrastructure projects, and to create an “infrastructure bank” to allow companies to resume hiring. His remarks were almost entirely about spending money to grow the economy, and this is because he’s now set up the conditions where he’s politically free to push this.
But extending them only for the lower brackets makes much better sense than extending them across the board. Obama has the next 18 months to advocate for that.
Well, if you notice, he keeps hitting that point over and over in public remarks. I agree that this message needs to be hammered by the rest of his party, but I have trouble seeing this as a more important victory than, say, saving the country from a deeper recession.
