The Obamaquester according to Harry

Harry Reid's view of the sequester -- and how we got saddled with it -- has been seeping into the national political narrative in recent weeks. Notwithstanding his alleged renewed bonds and recent successful teamwork with Obama, his view is not a pretty picture for the president.

In Twitter exchanges with Greg Sargent and others -- I think Jonathan Bernstein and Brian Beutler -- I have sought a convincing account and analysis and possibly justification of the Obama administration's thinking at the fiscal cliff -- why Biden, with Obama's backing, cut in on Reid's negotiations with McConnell and settled for half a revenue loaf and only a short-term sequester postponement. I haven't found one. And today's somewhat triumphal narrative by Sam Stein and Ryan Grim of the Democrats' short-term shutdown victory -- a purported tale of renewed harmony and mutual trust -- also provides the opposite of what I've sought: Reid's indictment of Obama's fiscal cliff conduct.

 He complained that Vice President Joe Biden had undercut fiscal cliff negotiations at the end of 2012, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was offered a more generous deal on tax revenue and sequester spending than Reid felt he could have crafted.
It didn't escape his notice, Reid said, that the deal Biden made conveniently postponed the budget cuts two months, or just long enough to allow the Inauguration and the State of the Union address to pass without the sequester's shadow. Senate Democrats had been pushing for a two-year delay and had been prepared to settle for just one.

We're still in the sequester's grip

George Packer zooms out from the latest fiscal skirmish to assess the state of budgetary warfare in the Obama era:

President Obama and the Democrats in Congress appear strong for refusing to give in to blackmail.

But in a larger sense the Republicans are winning, and have been for the past three years, if not the past thirty. They’re just too blinkered by fantasies of total victory to see it. The shutdown caused havoc for federal workers and the citizens they serve across the country. Parks and museums closed, new cancer patients were locked out of clinical trials, loans to small businesses and rural areas froze, time ran down on implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law, trade talks had to be postponed. All this chaos only brings the government into greater disrepute, and, as Jenny Brown’s colleagues dig their way out of the backlog, they’ll be fielding calls from many more enraged taxpayers. It would be naïve to think that intransigent Republicans don’t regard these consequences of their actions with indifference, if not outright pleasure. Ever since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural, pronounced government to be the problem, elected Republicans have been doing everything possible to make it true.

Twas the Night Before Shutdown (complete)

Twas the night before shutdown: the House changed its rules
To hold us all hostage to vain spiteful fools.

Poison pills had been stuffed in the CR with care
To deprive shiftless "others" of Obamacare.

A Senate CR, disinfected and clean,
Was blocked from a vote by the rightwing machine.

And Boehner with his baritone, and Cruz with his glower,
Took to podiums to prove gu'mmint could not sink lower.

So workers were furloughed and services shuttered.
The president was grounded, th'economy sputtered...

And all of a sudden the government mattered!
And Cruz and his crew with their own spite were spattered.

Twas the night be shutdown...Twas the night before default, cont.

The exciting conclusion...full epic after the jump.

     The leadership, stunned, called the vote off and soon
     The air fizzled out of the Tea Party balloon.

     The Senate bill, simplified, once more was tendered,
     As Boehner, Paul, Cruz in swift sequence surrendered.

     "We just didn't win. But we fought the good fight."
     Quite so -- if "good" equals "pumped full of spite."

     Thus did the caucus put on a brave face,
     Raised one more chorus of Ah-mazing Grace,

     Checked on their vitals and took a deep breath,
     Prepped to defend the sequester to death,

     Chanted their catechisms, glowing with pride --
     Beguiled, reviled and self-Cruzified.

Twas the Night Before Shutdown

Yesterday, Kurt Eichenwald tweeted:

Night before shutdown, House changed its rules so that ONLY GOP leadership could bring budget to floor. But it's the "Obama shutdown." Sigh. [Details here] .

The language sounded familiar, and seemed to gallop of its own accord as below -- with an assist from Matt Glassman as noted (MG):

Twas the night before shutdown: the House changed its rules
To hold us all hostage to vain spiteful fools.

Poison pills had been stuffed in the CR with care
To deprive shiftless "others" of Obamacare.

A Senate CR, disinfected and clean,
Was now blocked from a vote by the rightwing machine.

And Boehner with his baritone, and Cruz with his glower,
Took to podiums to prove gu'mmint could not sink lower.

General Giap and the GOP

Responding to Republican calls for a broad fiscal "dialogue" under the double threat of government shutdown and looming debt ceiling, the Times editorial board reacts with commendable incredulity -- but salts in, I think, a misconception (my emphasis):

This is a moment for immediate action to reopen government’s doors, not the beginning of a conversation that Republicans spurned when they lacked the leverage of a shutdown. They have refused to negotiate over the Senate’s budget, they have refused to negotiate over the president’s budget, and they have refused to negotiate to make the health law more efficient, insisting only on its demise. 

 The shutdown does not increase Republican leverage -- it erodes it.  Grover Norquist understands this:

Apocalypse now?

Robert Costa, perhaps the best-sourced reporter on Republican thinking, indicates that warnings in the wake of the 2011 debt ceiling deal that Obama had enabled debt ceiling terrorism for the foreseeable future were true:

Most of the conference is well aware of the consequences of default. In fact, over the past few years, the House GOP leadership has actually hosted private meetings for members about what default means and why it shouldn't happen. But, at the same time, Republicans are very eager to get some kind of 2011-esque concession from the White House and Senate Democrats on the budget, when they were able to pass legislation that led to sequestration. Of course, the political climate then was different, due to the GOP having recently won the House, but the GOP is hoping for a similar outcome this time, and you have leaders like Paul Ryan publicly talking about a larger agreement being possible. I'm still skeptical though, since most Republicans are unwilling, at all, to bend on taxes, and Democrats aren't exactly scrambling to cut a big deal with Boehner, who they think is in a weakened position.

Costa suggests that the current standoff over a short-term continuing resolution is likely to bleed into debt ceiling negotiations -- which Obama has stated categorically and repeatedly that he won't engage in. He also seems to think that Democrats are likely to waver in their resolve to negotiate neither the CR -- for which there's already agreement (on GOP terms) as to spending levels -- nor the debt ceiling. Here's Obama yesterday on the latter:

Does a clean CR mean a clean shot at Republicans?

I have been gnashing my teeth at Democrats' preemptive surrender on the spending levels in the ten-week continuing resolution passed by the House, which establishes the sequester as a spending baseline.  Why not amend the CR to reflect the spending levels in the House budget, I thought, as well as stripping out the defunding of Obamacare, and then negotiate over spending?  That would leave Republicans an out: they could claim the victory they've already won (on spending).

Maybe I was wrong.  Conceding the House spending levels puts the spotlight squarely on Republicans' extraneous demands. And oh did Obama shine that spotlight today.  He's fought two skillful election campaigns against Republicans, but I don't think he's ever so squarely accused them of moral bankruptcy as this:

Democrats won't cave on Obamacare -- but on everything else...?

I am getting weary of progressives' reflexive head-shaking over Republican "craziness" and mainstream reporters' warnings that the GOP may commit electoral suicide by ceding policy to their most extreme members.

Perhaps they will.  A party does not have a single will. There are doubtless Tea Party diehards that would shut down the government, push the nation into default, and never vote for any funding bill that includes the discretionary funding for Obamacare.

But they will not ultimately dictate the party's actions. What I strongly suspect will happen is that the Senate GOP will run down the clock, filibustering the so-called "clean" continuing resolution (with the Obamacare defund stripped out) until the last minute, then win a series of concessions making the horrendous House spending provisions worse -- shifting more funding under overall sequester caps from domestic to defense -- in exchange for allowing a vote [correction 9/24: Democrats need only a simple majority to amend the unchanged House CR -- thus, it's unlikely to get worse. But current reporting is confident that Senate Democrats will not amend the CR's spending provisions.] Then Senate Democrats will pat themselves on the back for "standing firm" against defunding Obamacare -- while locking in the sequester as a new funding baseline and shielding defense spending from much of its bite. Comforting reports that Red State Senate Democrats won't vote to defund Obamacare serve only to convince me that they'll give away everything else in the store.

Democrats should shut down the government

Not really. But they should let Republicans shut down the government rather than agreeing to a two-month continuing resolution that will bring on debt ceiling apocalypse.

When word was that Boehner would postpone a budget showdown until the debt ceiling is reached in November and try to force a defunding of Obamacare then, I suspected that he and his party would shift gears and seek to extract more attainable budget concessions. That has now happened, as Chait summarizes:

The Republican leadership is perfectly aware that a debt default could have explosive implications and that the Obama administration is not willing to negotiate over it. It’s already formulating a line of retreat to back out of this threat. As Politico reports, they want to tie together negotiations over the debt ceiling with negotiations over budget sequestration. Then they can extract concessions from Obama on the budget and sell them to their base as a ransom for lifting the debt ceiling, rather than admit they just gave in on the debt ceiling.

"Gave in" is a relative term. Extracting further budget cuts beyond sequestration would be a major GOP victory by my lights, if not by the GOP base's. And they may get it. As Chait warns here and has warned before, a debt default (stemming from failure to raise the debt ceiling) is a " vastly more dangerous threat" than a government shutdown. Yet Chait, like Greg Sargent and Brian Beutler, seems to have more faith than I do about what Obama will not yield to if faced with a debt default:

Listen to Boehner, Dems. When he announces a negotiating strategy, he executes

Republicans' latest reported strategy in the looming budget wars is to pass continuing resolutions that will fund the government at sequestration levels through November, when the next debt ceiling deadline looms -- then once again hold the country's faith and credit hostage to extremist demands like defunding Obamacare. Democrats should not take this strategy lightly. Methinks the account below, via The Week, gets the dynamics of this year's prior battles exactly backwards:

The Republican leadership has been increasingly under pressure to appease the right wing of the party. Publicly insisting that ObamaCare funding will be fought further down the road would soothe the demand for that fight in the first place, while kicking the can down the road, perhaps indefinitely.

As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent points out, this is exactly what happened with the last debt ceiling fight. In January, Boehner said the upcoming sequester debate, not debt ceiling fight, gave the GOP its best position to push for major budget cuts. Yet the sequester came and went without the GOP winning those deep concessions.

Come again? The sequester is "major budget cuts." As of now, those cuts are locked in for ten years, a seemingly immovable deadweight on Obama's long-term domestic agenda. Republicans may be ambivalent about their effects, actual and political, and ultimately unable to sustain their will to enact the cuts.  But they did not cave -- they decided to embrace the cuts, and they followed through, and the overall ten-year deficit reduction scorecard remains stuck at a 4-to-1 spending-cuts-to-tax-increases ratio.  In March it was Obama and the Democrats who caved, balking at forcing a government shutdown to shut off sequestration.

Boehner's not retreating, he's doubling down

Robert Costa has a funny little narrative today in which John Boehner and Eric Cantor, moderate old hands who know how Washington works, talk the GOP's young Turks off the ledge of a government shutdown when this year's funding runs out at the end of September.  We don't have the votes, we'll be blamed, etc. etc.  But then there's this kicker, which gave me hot flashbacks:

Members were also buzzing about the leadership’s emerging strategy for the autumn talks. Sources tell me the House GOP will probably avoid using a shutdown as leverage and instead use the debt limit and sequester fights as areas for potential legislative trades. Negotiations over increasing the debt limit have frequently been used to wring concessions out of the administration, so there may be movement in that direction: Delay Obamacare in exchange for an increased debt limit. As members huddled and talked through scenarios, leadership aides reminded them that since the House GOP retreat in Williamsburg, Va., earlier this year, the plan has been to end the year with a debt-limit chess game, and not a messy continuing-resolution impasse (my emphasis).

What this flashed me back to was not debt ceiling summer 2011, but early this year, when Boehner made rather a big show of not forcing a debt ceiling showdown, instead suggesting that his caucus would take its stand at the end of March, when the sequester kicked in. Progressive observers reacted with some incredulity that Boehner would let the sequestration cuts, which include massive defense cuts, happen. At the time, McConnell and Boehner's victory at the fiscal cliff  (Obama forced to settle for just half of his reduced December revenue demand, sequester set to spring in two months) was being viewed as a defeat. But it was Obama and the Democrats who folded when it came time to fund the government for the remainder of this fiscal year, quietly acceding to full uncut sequestration.

By reframing national agenda, Obama hopes to "force a different result" in budget negotiations

When Obama came his speech urging a national refocus on jobs and the foundations of long-term economic growth last Wednesday, the first in a series on the economy, I suggested that he was positioning himself to win a budget showdown should the Republicans shut down the government or seriously threaten a debt ceiling default if he does not agree to radical new spending cuts or the defunding of Obamacare. He is trying preemptively to reframe the argument, to convince the public that jobs and investments that foster long-term economic growth should be the national priority -- not spending cuts,.

In a long interview with the Times' Jackie Calmes and Michael Shear, conducted while he was at Knox College in Galesburg, IL to deliver that speech, Obama continued his bid to shift the agenda:

NYT: [House Republicans] are still embracing sequestration and who are still willing to use the debt limit to go to the mat. 

MR. OBAMA: Well, this is what they say. On the other hand, we also have a number of very thoughtful and sensible Republicans over in the Senate who have said that we should not play brinksmanship, that we should come up with a long-term plan. I met with a couple of House Republicans over the last several weeks who would like to see that happen. They’re not the loudest voices in the room at the moment. 

And part of what I’d like to see over the next several weeks is, if we’re having a conversation that’s framed as how are we growing the economy, how are we strengthening the middle class, how are we putting people back to work, how are we making college more affordable, how are we bringing manufacturing back -- the answer to those questions I think force a different result than if we are constantly asking ourselves how can we cut the deficit more, faster, sooner.

Is Obama preparing for nuclear budgetary war?

It's a foundation built upon five pillars that will grow our economy and make this new century another American century: new rules for Wall Street that will reward drive and innovation; new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive; new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and industries; new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations. That is the new foundation we must build. That must be our future – and my Administration's policies are designed to achieve that future.

That's Obama laying out his broader economic vision -- in April 2009. Three of the five pillars match the five cornerstones he laid down in yesterday/s speech on long term economic growth -- or rather two and a half, as his "jobs" cornerstone yesterday centered in large part on renewable energy.

As many pointed out, there were no new proposals in Obama's speech yesterday, and not much detail -- it was a framework, with details to be supplied in an upcoming series of speeches. And that's okay. As the political storms of autumn approach, dullness is good. Repetition is good. Reminder of what Obama is about -- how he thinks, how he carries himself, what he wants -- is useful, even if it doesn't excite anyone now. It's an impression scheduled for timed release.

Why Obama can't entirely channel Bill Clinton circa 1995

Worried by the Obama administration's apparent large concessions to date in the debt ceiling negotiations (demanding paltry revenue hikes in exchange for massive spending cuts), I've been reading newspaper chronicles of Bill Clinton's epic budget battles with the Republican House and Senate in 1995 and 1996, seeking a kind of benchmark and maybe a bit of reassurance.

Clinton pretty much won these battles, which were not really resolved until the Balanced Budget Act was agreed upon in August 1997. The $284 billion in Medicare cuts over seven years that the Republicans had written into their 1996 bills was winnowed down to $112 billion; the GOP's $182 billion in Medicaid cuts was reduced to a fraction of that and offset by $24 billion for the S-CHIP program to provide Medicaid to uninsured children; the $245 billion in tax cuts became $95 billion in cuts reflecting Clinton's priorities.

Think again, Kerry

I admire the way John Kerry has comported himself since Obama took office -- re Afghanistan, re New Start, re Egypt -- but I think this is a foolish sentiment:

"They've got to be laughing at us right now" in China, said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry. "How terrific that the United States of America can't make a decision."

While Republicans and Democrats have been busy denouncing each other's policies and motives, the Chinese authorities have further reduced their tolerance for denunciation -- or criticism -- from anyone:

Freshman GOP delusions

A freshman GOP congressman's attempt to differentiate a government shutdown today from the shutdown in 1995 is a study in distinctions without a difference  -- and in differences that cut against his argument. From a Jennifer Steinhauer story in yesterday's NYT:

“I don’t believe now and 1995 are similar times,” said Representative Lou Barletta, a freshman from Pennsylvania. “Back then it was more about how to balance the budget. Now it is about how to keep the country from going broke. Unemployment was much lower than now. The debt was 5 trillion. Now it is 14 trillion. In 1995 the Congress wanted to get its house in order. Now it’s the American people that want that, and that’s the only reason why we are here.” 

Let's take these assertions one at a time:

The politics of pique, redux

Do Republicans threatening to spike New START because their DADT stonewall broke down perchance remember how Newt Gingrich's confession-cum-boast that he was moved to shut down the government in part because he found himself seated at the back of Air Force One played out?

WASHINGTON (CNN) [Nov. 16, 1995] -- As the government budget standoff continued Thursday, House Speaker Newt Gingrich indicated the Republican hard line was due, in part, to a "snub" from President Clinton during their recent trip to Israel for the funeral of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. White House Chief of Staff

Leon Panetta called the Gingrich comment "bizarre."

Obama girds for 1994 II

Arguably the most revealing passage in Peter Baker's long interview with Obama is the very last sentence:

Well, I’m actually looking at “The Clinton Tapes,” which is Taylor Branch’s chronicle of certain conversations he had with Clinton. It is fascinating.

Those "certain conversations" occurred throughout Clinton's presidency -- they represent Clinton's attempt to get a real-time record while memory was fresh.  (Clinton kept the tapes, but after each session, Branch recorded what he could recall while driving home).   When Branch published The Clinton Tapes in 2009, striking parallels in the Republican response to a moderate Democratic president were already coming into focus.  Awareness of the parallels doubtless shaped Branch's presentation somewhat. But the raw material is Clinton's contemporaneous recollection.

The fulcrum of Clinton's story is the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. By that point, Clinton was as proud of his legislative record as Obama is now. Here he is on Nov. 10, 1994:

What a great start for a presidency-with five million new jobs, peace initiatives around the world, headed into a third year of unprecedented deficit reduction--until the crash in Tuesday's election.

It was in the middle term -- after Clinton successfully staved off the Gingrich Congress's atempt to radically cut Medicaid and Medicare and once perception of rip-roaring economic recovery caught up with reality -- that those accomplishments bore fruit for Clinton.  And Obama plainly has that political rhythm in mind:

On whether the experiences of past presidents offer him any lessons.
Look, history never precisely repeats itself. But there is a pattern in American presidencies — at least modern presidencies. You come in with excitement and fanfare. The other party initially, having been beaten, says it wants to cooperate with you. You start implementing your program as you promised during the campaign.

The other party pushes back very hard. It causes a lot of consternation and drama in Washington.

People who are already cynical and skeptical about Washington generally look at it and say, This is the same old mess as we’ve seen before. The president’s poll numbers drop. And you have to then sort of wrestle back the confidence of the people as the programs that you’ve put in place start bearing fruit and people can suddenly start seeing, Hey, you know what, this health care bill means my kid isn’t losing her health insurance once she leaves college even though she doesn’t have a job yet. Or you know what, the credit-card company can’t jack up my interest rate suddenly, and this is actually saving me some money. Or I’m a small business, and lo and behold, I don’t have to pay capital gains on my start-up, and I can plow that money back into my business.

And what you hope is that over time, despite all the rhetoric, people start seeing concrete benefits from what you’re doing and what was a valley goes back into a peak.

Now what you also hope is that sort of the ups and downs, the highs and lows start evening out a little bit so that people don’t have unrealistic expectations about how quickly we can move on big issues in a democracy but people don’t also plunge into despair when it takes more than six months to transform the world.

Strange indeed is the psychodrama with Bill Clinton in which Obama finds himself enmeshed. Recall that during the 2008 campaign, Obama gave Bill Clinton "tremendous credit" for balancing the budget, while velvet glove-punching him (and by extension Hillary) for not being able to put through a legislative agenda:

1995 redux

Today was a 1995 flashback, with Jim Bunning shutting down core government functions, sneering, growling and flipping the bird to a reporter, while Jim Kyle pronounced that unemployment benefits make people unwilling to work (cf. banker Potter in in It's a Wonderful Life: home mortgages breed "a discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty, working class"). What Democrat doesn't smell overreach?  On the same day, an IRS building is evacuated and a Hazmat team called after a suspicious substance is found -- two weeks after an anti-government Kamikaze flew a plane into another IRS building.

Today's apparent attack may have been illusory - the latest report claims that the substance in question was not hazardous -- and Joseph Stack's paranoid rage was politically heterodox.   But one needn't tag these assaults -- or pranks, or even mirages -- as coherent political acts to catch a wave of Gingrich-era deja vu.


In April 1995, the Gingrich Congress was in full flush of its "First 100 Days" when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City -- and Clinton reasserted himself as Consoler-in-Chief and started talking about the fires of anti-government rage stoked by hateful talk radio. A few months later came the government shutdown,  when Clinton faced down Gingrich, Dole et al and forced them to back off what he called "cruel" cuts to Medicare,  Medicaid, education, the earned income tax credit, etc. (helped by Gingrich's public boast that he'd shut down the government because Clinton snubbed him and Dole on Air Force One, seating them at the back). Clinton's poll numbers soared in 1995 and basically never came down.  


Of course, Clinton only regained his moxie after failing to reform health care and losing the House and Senate.  He was never able to pass major legislation thereafter. Is it too much to hope that Obama has suffered his Dunkirk early?  That right now the latest bout of anti-government fever will break, Democrats will breathe and pass health care reform, and go on to weather normal midterm losses?