CT Blue

One would like to think that local media, including local independent newspapers, would be immune from the disease of beltway centrism, but at least in the case of the New London Day, that’s clearly not the case. Today’s Day channels the Washington Post.

A basic requirement for beltway punditry is that one must operate in a historical vacuum. One must pretend, for instance, that experiences of the very recent past will not repeat themselves. For instance, one must pretend to believe that this time around the Republican Lucys will not pull the football away. The Day follows the pundits’ lead. In a nutshell: Obama is right, but the deadlock is still his fault. The unspoken corollary is that since we can’t expect Republicans to be reasonable, there is no reason to demand that they should be. So, here’s the Day:

Conceptually, President Obama talks of the kind of approach to reducing deficit spending that most economists agree is the right one. It is the approach recommended by the deficit-reduction committee he appointed, headed by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles. That approach involves modest cuts in the short term, while reforming the big entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – that will be unsustainable long term without adjustments to curb spending. President Obama is also right in calling on Congress to raise revenues by reforming tax policies – ending the carried interest tax rate that allows hedge fund or private equity managers to pay a measly 15 percent tax rate on their vast incomes, correcting abuses in the use of deductions, and ending tax policies that provide incentives to move jobs overseas.

The problem is that the president has not laid out a detailed proposal. Even in a second term, and no longer having to face an election, he refuses to provide details of how he would rein in entitlement spending, fearful apparently of causing damage to the Democratic Party by staking out positions that will be politically unattractive.

(via theday.com Mobile Edition)

Maybe I’m giving the Day too much credit; maybe it’s channeling David Brooks. At least the Post did some good work in the seventies, whereas Brooks has never been known to actually know what he’s talking about. It will be up to future historians to try to solve the mystery of precisely why Brooks has a column in the New York Times. He takes full advantage of his right wing right to make things up, in this case his right to claim that Obama does not have a specific plan to deal with the sequester, a claim the Day embraces in the editorial above. Brooks came out with that gem last week, and unashamedly admitted it wasn’t true shortly thereafter.

> Ezra Klein: In the column, you said that the Obama administration doesn’t have a plan to replace the sequester. I feel like I’ve had to spend a substantial portion of my life reading their various budgets and plans to replace the sequester, and my sense is that you’ve had to do this, too. So, what am I missing?

> David Brooks: First, the column was a bit of an over-the-top lampooning column about dance moves. I probably went a bit too far when saying the president didn’t have a response to the sequester save to raise taxes on the rich. In the cool light of day, I can say that’s over the top. There’s chained CPI and $400 billion in health proposals. So I should say I was unfair. I’m going to attach a note to the column, if it’s not up already.

> The second thing I would say is that, as [Congressional Budget Office director] Doug Elmendorf said in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, there’s no scorable plan they’ve come up with, at least this time around. And given that one theme of the budget negotiations has been that it can be very hard to tell what’s on the table from the White House, it would serve the country well if they put out something specific.

> EK: I don’t know the Elmendorf comments off-hand, but CBO did score the president’s budget, and almost all of their proposals are drawn from that. I find, in general, that legislators often ask Elmendorf if he’s scored things from the White House and then crow about the fact that he hasn’t, when all that’s really going on is CBO doesn’t score everything the president does or says.

(via [Does Obama have a plan? A conversation with David Brooks)

The “centrist” media, a category to which the Day clearly aspires, is slowly coming around to implicitly recognize the fact that Republicans are crazy, but it still refuses to let go of its insistence that both sides are to blame, even as one side (Obama and the Democrats) pretty much embraces “centrist” prescriptions. In order to preserve the “both sides are to blame” myth, it has turned to “yes, the Republicans are crazy but it’s still Obama’s fault because…” lines of argument, in this case “because Obama has failed to lead by laying out a specific plan to deal with the sequester.” The Post is, in addition, also pushing the line that because, supposedly, Obama suggested the sequester, and because the sequester itself contains only cuts, any solution to the manufactured “crisis” must itself consist of only cuts. (This raises the question of why we should do anything, if Obama is just supposed to match one set of cuts with another. The answer, of course, is that we are not serious people unless we preserve wasteful military spending by relieving the citizenry of the burdens of Medicare benefits and social security. After all, beltway pundits don’t need these things, but they have friends making money off defense spending. ) The Day, so far as I can tell, has not yet drunk that Kool-Aid, though it does get quite teary eyed over the possibility that we might not build enough useless submarines. But by and large, it’s going with the “specific plan” gambit.

Give the Day extra credit, however, for insisting on changes to social security despite the fact that it has nothing to do with the deficit. That’s de rigueur for aspiring centrists, who never let facts get in the way of a good meme. But note that even while doing so, they refuse to recognize that Obama’s embrace of chained CPI, is in fact a specific proposal to stick it to the middle class, which is apparently what the Day is demanding.

I am by no means endorsing Obama’s specific proposals. They are far too “centrist” (i.e., soaked in Beltway dogma and skewed against the 99% (remember them?)). The fact is, though, that they do exist. Obama’s budget reflects what Day type “centrists” want, and very little of what the majority of the American people want-or need. Our “centrists” are a vital cog in the Republican machine, validating and justifying the ever rightward moving “center” of our political discourse. Consider the latest attempt by Simpson and Bowles to enter the fray. They started out, bear in mind, as the co-chairs of a commission that was supposed to come up with an economic plan that was best for the country, on the merits. But the latest proposal from the co-chairs (the commission is dead and never actually made a proposal) is an admitted attempt to find the mid ground between Obama’s “centrism”, which is only slightly (if at all) to the left of the original proposal from Simpson and Bowles (not from the commission, remember), and the Republican’s new crazy:

This isn’t meant to be an update to Simpson-Bowles 1.0. Rather, it’s meant to be an outline for a new grand bargain. To that end, Simpson and Bowles began with Obama and Boehner’s final offers from the fiscal cliff deal. That helps explain why their tax ask has fallen so far: Obama’s final tax ask was far lower than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles plan, while Boehner’s tilt towards spending cuts was far greater than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles.

(via Ezra Klein)

So the goalposts move again, and Simpson and Bowles move along with them, and then complain about the fact that some people don’t find them all that credible.

Back to the Day. It’s a shame that the editorialists there don’t have the time to educate themselves about the issues on which they pontificate. Perhaps they figure that if David Brooks can make up his own facts, why shouldn’t they be able to pass them along.