Obama and the House Radicals

Elizabeth Drew
New York Review of Books

As is his custom, President Obama erred on the side of caution in confronting this country’s grave fiscal crisis. On Wednesday he gave a good speech far too late. What if he hadn’t been so dilatory on a subject he inevitably would have to confront?

Consider this picture: in early 2010, the Tea Party was a mere specter, not yet a full-blown movement, much less an election victor, and it was unimaginable that it would, in effect, seize control of one body of the Congress. Even if Obama had addressed the fiscal crisis at the outset of this year, rather than deliver a wan and cautious State of the Union address, he would have set the predicate for the current budget battle rather than leaving an opening for Paul Ryan’s radical (and somewhat nonsensical) proposal to fill the vacuum. In essence, Ryan’s plan would change Medicare and Medicaid almost beyond recognition and sharply lower tax rates for the wealthiest individuals and for corporations. It relies on strange assumptions, such as 2.8 percent unemployment by 2021, and it appears to come nowhere near his claimed savings of $1.6 trillion. Ordinarily, such a proposal would have been laughed out of town, but now it’s been transformed into respectability.

The possibility of a bipartisan “Grand Bargain” has grown dimmer, given the lines that have now been drawn, and the Republicans’ perhaps inevitable hyperbole about the President’s speech, which they denounced as “partisan” (Heavens!) and a campaign gimmick. They could not entertain the possibility that Obama’s was a serious, thoughtful offering. The House’s adoption Thursday of the deal made between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner last Friday offers a glimmer of a possibility of compromise on much larger issues, but if the past is prologue, they would be compromises essentially on Republican terms.

For Obama, this struggle has always been about two things. Politically, he has to show that he is more fiscally responsible than his Republican opponents. He also has to get results that are substantively sound. The two issues he must now grapple with are drastically reducing the size of the huge annual deficits (the difference between spending and revenues in any given fiscal year), officially projected this year to reach a staggering, once inconceivable $1.5 trillion. His second challenge is to persuade the Congress to raise the limit (the so-called debt ceiling) on the national debt, now estimated to be over $14 trillion, nearly rivaling the nation’s GDP. The limit is now predicted to be reached in mid-May (though the deadline is fluid because the Treasury can employ tricks for a while to keep the government liquid).

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