The promise of an Obama second term

E.J. Dionne makes a great case today that Obama has a substantive and productive second term agenda, whether or not he makes the case for it as strongly as he might. After reminding us that Obama has in fact laid out a detailed deficit reduction plan -- attacked from left and right, but no less credible for that, he gets to what I consider the core:

Some dismiss what an Obama second term might achieve by claiming that it will be mainly concerned with consolidating his first-term accomplishments. If these had been trivial, that might be a legitimate criticism. But does anyone seriously believe that implementing a massive new health insurance program that will cover an additional 30 million Americans is unimportant? Can anyone argue that translating the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms into workable regulations is a minor undertaking?

Here is the case for a term of consolidation that I made informally, in a letter to a friend:

The Supreme Court opens markets

E.J. Dionne, lamenting the escalated corruption of our politics triggered by the Citizens United decision, begins by implicitly questioning why Wall Street and so many business interests are gunning for Obama:

The 2010 election is turning into a class war. The wealthy and the powerful started it.

This is a strange development. President Obama, after all, has been working overtime to save capitalism. Wall Street is doing just fine and the rich are getting richer again. The financial reform bill passed by Congress was moderate, not radical.

Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats.

Dionne doesn't bother to ask why -- he focuses on the how, i.e. the new freedom to anonymously donate unlimited amounts of cash to groups deploying political ads. But as to why, as noted here once before, Bill Clinton explained succinctly to Taylor Branch in 1995:

Dionne, give the Dems a break

No one in the reality-based community would object to E.J. Dionne's core point below. But I do have a problem with the final sentence (helpfully boldfaced..):

Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid? 

Start with taxes. In every other serious democracy, conservative political parties feel at least some obligation to match their tax policies with their spending plans. David Cameron, the new Conservative prime minister in Britain, is a leading example.

He recently offered a rather brutal budget that includes severe cutbacks. I have doubts about some of them, but at least Cameron cared enough about reducing his country's deficit that alongside the cuts, he also proposed an increase in the value-added tax from 17.5 percent to 20 percent. Imagine: a fiscal conservative who really is a fiscal conservative.

That could never happen here because the fairy tale of supply-side economics insists that taxes are always too high, especially on the rich.

This is why Democrats will be fools if they don’t try to turn the Republicans’ refusal to raise taxes on families earning more than $250,000 a year into an election issue. If Democrats go into a headlong retreat on this, they will have no standing to govern.

That last sentence triggers in me a feeling I have experienced more than once recently: a vicarious weariness on behalf of Democrats in Congress.