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.