Some time ago Tom Tomorrow released a cartoon in which he speculated that Bush and Cheney, et. al., were actually aging 60s radicals who had plotted for years to get elected as right wing Republicans and screw everthing up, guaranteeing that the Democrats could take over and fulfill their radical agenda. The only problem, in the cartoon, was that it turned out that Obama was leading a similar conspiracy from the right.
Sometimes, I wonder whether there wasn’t more than a grain of truth in that cartoon. Witness today’s announcement that Obama will unilaterally freeze the pay of 2,000,000 federal workers, thus giving the Republicans a) something they very much want anyway, and b) 2,000,000 votes (more if you count family and friends) they might otherwise never have gotten. All this in the name of making “tough choices” and taming the deficit, based on the fantasy that the economy has turned around and that it’s time to tackle the structural deficit instead of further stimulating the economy. It is, of course, irrelevant in this nation, at this time, given the level of our discourse, that the structural deficit is a function of health care costs, and that Obama’s tough choice will simply hurt two million people while doing precisely nothing to affect long term deficits and while it further decreases the demand that the economy needs to recover in real life as opposed to the Obama Administration’s fantasy world.
In return for throwing 2,000,000 people under the bus, Obama got what he always gets in negotiations with the Republicans: nothing. Only this time, he didn’t even try to get anything. He gave them this bone for free. They will now proceed to get him to make another “tough choice”: tax breaks for the rich in amounts that make the money saved by screwing federal workers look like peanuts.
If Obama and his crew are really plotting to hand the country over to Sarah Palin, then they’re brilliant. But if they’re not-if Tom Tomorrow was wrong- then we’re seeing political malpractice on an unprecedented scale.
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