A fighting President Obama is better than one who pretends to stay aloof
Gone are the days when liberal America let itself be mesmerised by a big Obama speech. Long gone. Today's president acts only after a blizzard of advice from the centre-left telling him, with varying degrees of exasperation, what he should say. The implication is that it no longer trusts him to do the right thing. Barack Obama has by now established something of a track record in stinging this section of his electorate with a cattle prod. Extending Bush-era tax cuts for the super-rich was one instance. Budget cuts he agreed with Congress to prevent a shutdown of federal government last week were another. The White House dismayed them by actually trumpeting the cuts (to health, education, housing, transportation) as being among the largest in history, while making a virtue of the fact that they would not undermine the economy. Not only did some economists rightly dispute this claim. They also questioned why their president had stopped fashioning himself as a job creator (his first incarnation after the banking crash) and had now started painting himself as a deficit cutter.
Mr Obama had got the tactics wrong: he let the Republicans go first. The Republican chairman of the House budget committee, Paul Ryan, duly obliged, by saying he would cut federal spending by $6tn over the next decade by radically restricting healthcare access and giving away $4.5tn to the highest earners. The White House was being too clever by half. The idea was to let Mr Ryan look so extreme that it would give Democrats the room to attack. What happened instead was that the Ryan plan framed the debate. Mr Obama had a ready-made debate filler before he himself chose to wade in – a bipartisan commission on the subject which came out with a centrist mixture of spending cuts and tax increases. But having convened the commission, he pointedly failed to say anything about its conclusions. So once again Republican talk of drastic and immediate deficit reduction with simultaneous large tax cuts filled the void. It did not work when Ronald Reagan tried it. All that happened was that a deficit was racked up. But if it did not work once, it was worth trying again.
Mr Obama had his work cut out. The crossfire started before he had opened his mouth last night, when Republicans briefed on the plan rejected it outright. In the end, Mr Obama borrowed heavily from the bipartisan commission he had up until then studiously failed to endorse by proposing to reduce the deficit by $4tn in 12 years, two years longer than the commission proposed. Only one of the four points held some cheer for liberals, the promise to end Bush-era tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. The rest would involve heavy cuts – $770bn in savings to discretionary spending, and $480bn in Medicare and Medicaid. But the deadline of 2023 is less harsh than the commission proposed. To the disappointment of many of his supporters, Mr Obama devoted a good part of the speech to the growing deficit itself, which if left unchecked could lead America to default.
The plan itself is just the opening shot of a mammoth battle. More important were the terms in which he framed the debate. This, he said, was not simply about numbers and figures, but a vision of how America would look in the future. The Ryan plan, he declared, would not simply change the America he knew, it was a fundamentally pessimistic vision of the most powerful country in the world – one which could not afford good roads, or clean air, or to care for the elderly or sick. But under it, America could afford to give tax breaks to the most wealthy. There was nothing courageous about asking for a sacrifice from those who could least afford it and who did not have any clout on Capitol Hill, he said. By casting Democrats as the protectors of the American dream, and Republicans as the wreckers, he began to turn the tables. It was at least a start. A fighting president is better than one who pretends to stay aloof.