Deepest Cuts

by George Packer
The New Yorker
April 25, 2011

In the fall of 1995, a year after the Democrats had lost control of both houses of Congress in a devastating midterm sweep, Bill Clinton’s advisers were so worried that he would give in to draconian Republican budget cuts that they joked about disconnecting the Oval Office phones to keep him from calling Newt Gingrich, then the Speaker of the House. Flying home on Air Force One from the funeral of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, aides maneuvered to keep the President from wandering back to sit with Gingrich (who promptly committed political suicide by announcing that he was toughening his budget demands in retaliation for being snubbed). In the end, though, Clinton stood fast for the quartet of Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. That December, when he vetoed the Republican budget, precipitating the second of two government shutdowns, he used the same pen that Lyndon Johnson had used to sign Medicare into law, thirty years earlier. Confrontation over principles sent the President’s poll numbers up, as triangulation never did, and he coasted to reëlection in 1996.

A few of those advisers are back in the White House, no doubt beset by déjà vu. In the months after last fall’s midterm wipeout, President Obama took to floating above the ugly congressional fray as if he were the unaffiliated head of state in a parliamentary system. In December, during the battle over the Bush tax cuts, he chided both sides for squabbling, and earlier this month, in the negotiations over the 2011 budget, he praised both sides for making sacrifices. While his supporters in public-sector unions around the country were desperately fighting—and, for the most part, failing—to retain their collective-bargaining rights, the President remained largely silent. The politics of his withdrawal were clear enough: in the wake of an electoral rebuke, Obama, like Clinton, was signalling to voters that he understood their displeasure. He was also positioning himself to be the candidate of the broad middle when he runs for reëlection.

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