CT Blue

The word is that Obama will be putting Medicare and Medicaid on the table for “reform”.

Anyone care to take a bet against the following scenario:

Obama will lead with a proposal that the Republicans could never have passed during the headiest days of the Bush Administration. His position will become the leftmost position of the debate. The Republicans will counter with a proposal to the right of what anyone would have suggested as remotely possible in those heady days. The mid-point will become the ever rightward drifting centrist position, toward which Obama will eagerly allow himself to be drawn. The eventual agreement will be somewhat to the right of the new moderate. Obama will hail the outcome as a victory for the American people and yet another example of bi-partisan cooperation. The deluded American people, misled as always by a media composed of elites that need neither Medicaid or Medicare, will initially give Obama “credit” for the compromise, but it will do him no long term good, and it will further depress voter turnout for the hapless Congressional Democrats that will bear the brunt of a policy decision with which most of them disagree.

As a bonus, and this is the only thing we can’t be sure of, the Republicans will run against Democrats for destroying Medicare.

I refer the reader to this post. II take no pleasure in saying that it looks like Obama is breathing down Bush’s neck in the ratings game.

UPDATE: Paul Krugman makes a similar point (” If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no — better to pursue the zero option of just doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts as a whole expire.”), but he thinks Obama’s opening bid is reasonably good, provided he doesn’t drift rightward. It would be so refreshing if Obama would stand firm. Perhaps the looming election will have an effect on his behavior, but I’m betting against it.

As I have courted divorce recently by criticizing Obama, it is incumbent upon me to give credit when credit is, or appears to be due. If this post at Kos can be relied upon, then it appears that, at least according to David Plouffe, Obama is planning on standing firm on some key issues.

Among the key points: Plouffe reiterated Obama’s support for ending the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy; he said the Ryan fiscal plan is dead on arrival because it cuts key priorities and would increase health care costs to seniors down the line; that Obama’s approach to reducing health care costs would be to reform the system rather than cut benefits; and that while he was willing to discuss ways to strengthen Social Security, he did not believe Social Security was a long-term driver of the nation’s debt.

All of these, if Obama stands firm, are political winners for the Democrats. In politics, if your opponent gives you a bat, it is your bounden duty to bash his head in with it. Obama and the Democrats have declined to do so, for reasons that remain mysterious, but may be related to Obama’s deluded belief that you can actually reason with the Republicans.

But there is no unalloyed good will out there. Apparently there is a tug of war in the Administration over whether it should join the Republicans and savage the middle class, with Geithner leading the charge for cutting social security. This is the guy, by the way, who has been shoveling money at the rich as if we had an infinite supply of it. We should have known we were in for it when he breezed through the confirmation process, despite the fact that he had tax problems which, if they would not have derailed his nomination, should at least have made it extremely unpleasant. But the word obviously went forth from the banks to the Republicans, and he got a pass. When the history of the Obama administration is written, many of its failures will be chargeable to Geithner.

Not yet, but a case can be made that he’s got a chance.

Let us begin by stipulating that George Bush was the worst president in American history. This is a claim I have made before, and it is hard to believe that any serious minded individual would argue that any other president was worse by any reasonable metric one might care to adopt.

Yet, paradoxically, I believe a case can be made that Obama may become a worse president than Bush, which by application of the mathematical principle that I am quite sure is not called transubstantiation, but ought to be, puts Obama in the running for the worst president ever, at least if one considers domestic policy only.

Hear me out.

I grant you that Obama is not a sociopath, so he does not inspire either the fear or loathing (among the sane) that Bush easily earned and so richly deserved. But that lack of extreme mental impairment is perhaps his downfall. Nor does evil permeate his entire administration, as it did with Bush. Incompetence and corruption were endemic throughout the Bush Administration, and Obama cannot match that. But…

First, lets define our terms. I believe it is fair to say that we should rate our presidents in terms of the evil they do, or, in rare cases, the good that is interred with their bones. I include among the evil done those acts of others that the president allows or enables, and that may prove to be Obama’s downfall. He does not choose to do harm, but he is willing to allow others to do so to prove that he is a man of reason, by the beltway standards that he seems to have wholly absorbed.

George Bush would have been ecstatic had he been able to destroy Social Security and Medicare, the good interred with the bones of FDR and LBJ. He was unable to do so. He didn’t even try to kill Medicare, and his attempt to destroy Social Security was a non-starter that was squelched by the Democrats in Congress, whose spines were stiffened by Nancy Pelosi and an energized base that was already convinced that Bush was the devil’s spawn. Try as he might, he was unable to cause the harm he would so much have liked to visit upon us.

Obama has a chance to succeed, if that’s the right word, where Bush either failed or feared to tread. When Bush was president, the Democrats, or most of them, had no interest in helping him. But there are surely plenty of chickenshit Democrats that will follow Obama off this cliff, should he choose to jump, and choose to jump he may.

I, and others, have expressed frustration at Obama’s tendency to accept the other guy’s position as his opening negotiating position, from which he then seeks to compromise. There is every reason to believe that he’ll follow that pattern with Social Security and Medicare, but unlike Bush, and simply because he’s a Democrat, he’ll drag enough Democrats along with him to make every Republican’s wet dream come true, something Bush could never do. Thus will the pliant and always “reasonable” Obama “accomplish” what the unbending sociopath could not.

Surely, at least on the domestic side, that accomplishment, along with his craven cave on the tax cut, will vault him way past Bush so far as causing permanent, irreparable harm to the people of this country. After all, even the Depression Bush allowed to happen would not have been irreparable, had Obama made a serious attempt to do anything about it when he had huge majorities in both houses. Destroy Social Security and Medicare now, and it’s a sure bet that no person now living will see their return. Millions of people will be reduced to penury in their old ages, their only consolation being that their life spans will be mercifully shortened due to a lack of health care.

So, in the next few weeks we may see. Will Obama take advantage of the political gift that Paul Ryan is offering him, or will he once again feel compelled to try to appease the unappeasable?

There is, of course, one thing that seems to make Bush’s hold on worst ever unassailable. On the foreign policy end, it may be hard for Obama or anyone to match a disastrous war of choice and the permanent destruction of America’s already tattered reputation. And no, the Libyan adventure doesn’t qualify as a match.

But purely looking at it from the domestic side, Obama may soon, if he runs true to form, top Bush, though I suppose the case can be made that if we limit it to domestic harm, maybe Jimmy Buchanan or one of the other midgets from that era might slip through to take the prize. Scant comfort to either Obama or the country.