Stuck with Obama

Do elections matter? This was the question that preoccupied me during the fiscal cliff standoff last December. Obama won a significant victory, certainly what would have been declared in prior decades a "mandate" election, yet for Republicans it was business as usual. The GOP ended up buckling a little, giving in on a tax increase for those earning above $400,000 a year which will end up raising $600 billion in revenue over 10 years. But now as Obama continues to chase after his Grand Bargain grumbling has begun in the Democratic caucus over the deal to avert the fiscal cliff. This from a story today by Richard Stevenson and John Harwood, Obama Seeks to Bridge Partisan Divide in Search of a Budget Deal:

The second-guessing extends to virtually every aspect of the deal: its failure to postpone the automatic budget cuts for more than two months, its failure to raise the federal debt limit and its yield of $600 billion in new tax revenue over 10 years out of $4 trillion of new taxes that would have taken effect had the Bush tax cuts been allowed to expire. 

Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said the White House should have negotiated after the election with the bipartisan group of senators that he is courting now, rather than resuming the talks with Speaker John A. Boehner that failed in 2011. In the agreement that concluded that 2011 standoff, said John D. Podesta, a former White House chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, the administration committed a “fundamental miscalculation” by believing Republican opposition to automatic Pentagon cuts would compel them to accept tax increases. 

Other Democratic critics say the president should have ratcheted up pressure on Republicans by allowing all the Bush-era tax cuts to expire, even at the risk of saddling middle-class families with tax increases and inflicting harm on the economy. 

“Thinking they’d have a second bite of the apple was a real mistake,” said Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

What Obama has put on the table now, in hopes of securing a big budget deal with Republicans, is Medicare and Social Security:

Mr. Obama has signaled a willingness to reduce cost-of-living increases for Social Security by using a less-generous measure of inflation. He has indicated openness to imposing means-testing on Medicare beneficiaries so that high-income retirees would pay more for their medical care, and he has put on the table $400 billion of cuts in Medicare over the next decade. 

Republicans say they are looking for more, including two elements they discussed with the White House during failed talks in 2011: raising the eligibility age for Medicare and cutting federal costs for Medicaid. 

White House officials said that those proposals were deeply flawed as a matter of policy and that they did not intend to submit any more offers until Republicans expressed some willingness to make tax revenue part of the equation. 

But Mr. Cantor raised an idea last month that had been endorsed by the Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction commission: merging Medicare’s hospital and doctor coverage into one program in a way that could generate savings. Some Democrats also see that kind of proposal — in which Medicare is left fundamentally intact but is overhauled to become more efficient and which could potentially charge the affluent elderly more — as the basis for negotiation.

On the Counterpunch web site this past weekend in an article titled "The Grand Bargainer: Elections Have Consequences, Right?" Andrew Levine concludes that elections don't matter; that by now it should be clear to all those Liberals and Progressives who have supported Obama that he is not governing with their interests in mind. Case in point is entitlement cuts. Obama ran as the candidate who will protect Social Security and Medicare. Now he is negotiating to cut those programs. Levine calls for radical action without specifying what that means:

This is why elections hardly matter any more, why their consequences are superficial and cosmetic at best. 

It is not hard to imagine ways to pursue peace, abandon austerity, protect the environment, and restore the rule of law while leaving basic economic and political structures intact. Palliatives abound. 

But with capitalist power so overwhelming, even palliatives are unreachable in the usual way – through elections. 

Three decades ago, at the dawn of the neoliberal era, Margaret Thatcher famously declared: “there is no alternative.” She meant no alternative to the economic system that goes by her name and Ronald Reagan’s. She was wrong of course; there are alternatives, plenty of them. Because they are obvious, everyone knows what they are. 

But because capitalism has undermined democracy to such an extent that we cannot now get from here to there – indeed, from here to anywhere capitalist grandees don’t want to go — it is fast becoming true that the only solutions are radical ones.

But radical action rejecting the normal political process was tried recently. It was Occupy Wall Street. And, as Jeff Madrick writes in the march issue of Harper's, it was crushed by police action:

But it has become increasingly clear that OWS didn’t fizzle because its objectives were too muddled or its talk too abstract or its organization too chaotic. In fact, the movement was undone by a concerted government effort to undo it.

That's why so much of the Left is still with Obama. He's the only game in town. We'll see. If he folds and ends up agreeing to an increase in eligibility age for Medicare, I think there will be a huge ruckus in Democratic ranks and the abandonment of Obama will rapidly commence. For that reason, since it is still early in his second term, I don't think he will agree to an increase in eligibility age. A chained CPI, yes; he has already agreed to that (which is not good because it amounts to a benefit reduction). But for the time being we're stuck with Obama and the hope that he's not going to sell us down the river like Clinton did in his second term with the repeal of Glass-Steagall and his war on Yugoslavia.