Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column this week takes Barack Obama to task for “[spending] his first year losing the center, which elected him, and his second losing his base, which is supposed to provide his troops.”
Nut graf, regarding the deal Obama cut to extend the Bush-era tax cuts while cutting the payroll tax and extending unemployment benefits for 13 months:
President Obama was supposed to be announcing an important compromise, as he put it, on tax policy. Normally a president, having agreed with the opposition on something big, would go through certain expected motions. He would laud the specific virtues of the plan, show graciousness toward the negotiators on the other side—graciousness implies that you won—and refer respectfully to potential critics as people who’ll surely come around once they are fully exposed to the deep merits of the plan.
Instead Mr. Obama said, essentially, that he hates the deal he just agreed to, hates the people he made the deal with, and hates even more the people who’ll criticize it. His statement was startling in the breadth of its animosity. Republicans are “hostage takers” who worship a “holy grail” of “tax cuts for the wealthy.” “That seems to be their central economic doctrine.”
Actually, far from being hostage takers, Republicans got taken – at least according to Charles Krauthammer’s latest column:
Swindle of the year
Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 – and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years – which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?
It is in NoonanWorld, where Obama is considered a liberal-alienating stooge of cool-hand GOP overlords:
The White House itself still probably thinks the Republicans can save him, by overstepping, by alienating moderates. But so far, on domestic matters, they’re looking pretty calm and sober. They didn’t crow at the tax compromise, for instance, even though they knew the left is correct: It wasn’t a compromise, it was a bow. To reality, but a bow nonetheless.
Maybe it’s Noonan who needs to bow to reality.
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I hate to say it, but Noonan got it right, at least in the nut graf. There is no reason to believe that these tax cuts will stimulate the economy since they are basically the same tax rates that have not worked for the past two or ten years depending on how you look at it. In fact, there is no consensus that tax cuts of any kind can get a country out of a recession; England, Ireland, and Greece are doing just the opposite.
As far as bowing to reality is concerned, I don’t buy it. If Obama announced that the would veto any bill with, for example, the estate tax giveaway, it would take a two-thirds majority in both houses to override him. Yet somehow the estate tax bill is seen as some kind of a juggernaut that only a brave but doomed bunch of resisters in Congress futilely oppose, while Obama has wisely accepted the inevitable. Besides “time is running out and the Republicans are taking hostages!”
Baloney. Everyone knew about about the estate tax. Democrats in Congress had two years to fix it, and as a revenue item it was not even subject to filibuster. Instead, they spent the last two years looking for an excuse to cave in.
I’m not saying that Obama and the Democrats are weak, indecisive, or stupid. That’s not how you get elected to high office–you get elected by doing favors for rich people who can fund your next campaign. That’s what’s going on here, sorry to say.
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