Yesterday’s fiscal responsibility summit turned out to be pretty boring. And that all-encompassing dullness tended, I think, to obscure the real story coming out of the summit—the way Barack Obama basically rolled the Blue Dogs. I’ve been resistant to “secret plan” theories of Obama administration activities, but now that we can look at this sequence [...]
Yesterday’s fiscal responsibility summit turned out to be pretty boring. And that all-encompassing dullness tended, I think, to obscure the real story coming out of the summit—the way Barack Obama basically rolled the Blue Dogs. I’ve been resistant to “secret plan” theories of Obama administration activities, but now that we can look at this sequence of events in retrospect, the plan looks to have been pretty solid. Faced with Blue Dog pressure over the stimulus, the White House agreed to bend-not-break and make a big deal about how the deficit is terrible and we need a summit about fiscal responsibility. Then he unveiled a plan to contain the medium-term deficit that consists of tax hikes on the wealthy and fewer wars. Good ideas! But not ideas that involve liberals giving any actual ground. Similarly, he’s moved decisively to execute liberals’ long-time hope of redefining the “entitlement problem” as primarily a problem that requires systematic health care reform.
None of this, obviously, forces Blue Dogs to support the Obama agenda. But it does more or less smoke them out. The caucus has managed to obtain a reputation for “fiscal discipline” over the past few years without doing anything to observe it. Moderate Democrats have been much more likely than liberals to support the two main drivers of debt over the past eight years—tax cuts and the war in Iraq—but a lot of hot air and sporadic opposition to small-bore items like alternative energy funding have sufficed to get that reputation. Obama has managed to not so much seize the mantle of fiscal responsibility as simply dramatize the longstanding point that there’s been nothing especially deficit hawkish about Blue Doggery nor anything especially budget busting about the basic progressive agenda.
All told, it’s a small-scale political masterstroke. Obama’s progressive agenda remains what it’s always been, but now it’s fiscally responsible! Not that I thought it is or was ever irresponsible. But it lacked the “fiscally responsible” label, and now he’s got it without giving anything up.
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