President Chamberlain
I could not help but think of Neville Chamberlain famously waving the paper containing the 1938 Munich Agreement when Barack Obama signed the Republican debt-ceiling increase and claimed it as his own.
The White House called it a “bipartisan deal” and a “win for the economy and for budget discipline.” In reality, the debt ceiling deal was a crushing defeat for the President and for his party. A flawed Republican strategy to pull the country out of the economic crisis had been claimed and owned by a Democratic President. When this agreement makes the economic situation worse in the next year it is not the Republicans who will be held responsible for its failure, but the White House that touted it. The country loses as the economic problems deepen and the President loses when the voters punish him and his party for “his” debt deal. This was not the first time that Barack Obama has surrendered to the Republicans without a fight. The debt crisis debacle is only the latest example of a consistent lack of nerve by the President.
To say that President Obama has been a disappointment to the people who elected him would be an understatement. Democratic primary voters narrowly preferred Obama to Hillary Clinton in 2008 partially because of concern that with Hillary we would get eight more years of Bill Clintons’ “triangulation” strategy. President Clinton nearly always gained politically from his confrontations with Republicans, but liberals complained because he didn’t help his party. The hope was that Obama would have the courage of his convictions, that the man who wrote Dreams of my Father would be a voice for progressive ideas as George W. Bush had been a voice for conservative ones. Instead we have a President who half-heartedly implements Clinton’s triangulation, and does it badly.
The largest example of this tendency was the health care debate in 2009-10. The President said he did not want to determine the legislative debate by giving a specific plan of his own. He also clearly supported a bipartisan plan, expecting that Republicans would be willing to break ranks for the right price. To this end, Harry Reid and other Democrats spent months negotiating with Republicans while periodically withdrawing progressive ideas without extracting any concessions from their opponents. A single payer system was thrown out first, followed by nearly every money-saving measure in the bill. The last to go was the Public Option, which would have tested the Republican claim that no government program can compete with private business. The reward for all of these concessions when the bill came up for final passage in March 2010 was: zero. No Republican lawmaker in the House or the Senate voted for the final bill. The law was derided as being socialist, containing “death panels” and “rationing care.” Obama saw the passage of a health care law, but one which was much weaker and more conservative than it needed to be.
The stimulus bill of 2009 also saw this pattern, where President Obama unilaterally took progressive ideas off the table such as greater spending on infrastructure and mortgage assistance while including conservative favorites; tax cuts. Multiple Nobel Prize winning economists suggested that the government stimulus needed to be around $2 trillion to account for the private business shortfall. Tax cuts have also been shown to be poor at stimulus because they do not create a positive feedback loop of investment the way direct government spending can. The final bill was a little over $800 billion, about 40% of what it needed to be, and was one-quarter tax cuts. The reward for the concessions to pass this bill was three Republican votes in the Senate and none in the House. The GOP immediately started crafting their 2010 electoral strategy around the “failed” stimulus which the President and the Democratic leadership had allowed them to poison.
A third example is the extension of the Bush tax cuts. President Obama had staked out a position early that he wanted to keep the tax cuts for all but the top five percent of earners. By that time, the Republicans had his measure. They held out for extending all of the tax cuts and threatened to let all of them expire if the President did not go along. Rather than holding his ground, a position that has consistently had seventy percent support in polls, he complained that the GOP was holding the country hostage and renewed the tax cuts for another two years.
Even beyond these examples of capitulation to his political opposition, Barack Obama has consistently adopted the rhetoric of his opponents rather than making the progressive case for policies. He implicitly accepts that government is the problem, that tax cuts are always good, and that our current economic issues revolve around the federal deficit rather than jobs. He placed cuts to Medicare and Social Security in play in the debt negotiations without asking for anything in return. He refused to hold any Wall Street bankers responsible for their behavior and allowed his financial regulatory agency to be neutered by Congress.
In 1938, Prime Minister Chamberlain famously declared that the Munich Agreement would assure “peace for our time.” World War Two started almost exactly a year later when Germany invaded Poland. Britain declared war in 1939, but too late to stop the six year bloodbath that followed. Similarly, Barack Obama will find that the debt standoff and the extension of the Bush tax cuts have only emboldened his enemies. Just as Chamberlain did, he will belatedly realize his mistake and then choose to fight. Like the Prime Minister, he will probably see that fight take place without him as his party chooses a more forceful leader.
