We need to catch a plane here, but I wanted to toss in this Cockburn bomb before we leave. He is suggesting that Mitt Romney might be a wise choice for the office of The One next time around. Logic is familiar to me.
Start with Obama. Of course he blew it. Whether by artful design or by sheer timidity is immaterial. He blew it. Two days before the United States was officially set to default on its debts on August 2, Barack Obama had the Republicans where he wanted them: All he had to do was announce that he’d trudged the last half mile towards a deal but that there’s no pleasing fanatics who reject all possibilities of compromise, who are ready and eager to shut down the government, to see seniors starve and vets denied their benefits. So, Obama could proclaim, he was invoking the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution which states that the “validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”
Obama could have done that, but he didn’t. At the eleventh hour and the fifty-fifth minute he threw in the towel, and allowed the Republicans to exult that they’d got 95 per cent of what they wanted: cuts in social programs, a bipartisan congressional panel to shred at its leisure what remains of the social safety net, no tax hikes for the rich, no serious slice in the military budget.
As America plummets into phase 2 of the double-dip recession Obama’s deal has stripped the country of all available remaining defenses: no jobs program, no hope of stimulus money for stricken states and cities across the country. It’s as bad as the Republicans’ onslaught on Franklin Roosevelt’s programs seeking to prise America out of the great Depression – a Republican onslaught that launched the terrible downturn of 1937, from which America was extricated only by the vast war spending after Pearl Harbor.
Read the whole thing, just for shits and giggles. I’ve been reading Alex for two decades now, and his insight is always two floors above me. Love the guy!
OK. We’re outta here!
Piece of Mindful 
I don’t see how invoking the 14th amendment, or threatening to do so, was ever on Obama’s plate as a bargaining chip. It would have been 100% politically disastrous for him, making it no political bargaining chip at all.
Republicans proved throughout this whole process that their #1 goal was to damage Obama politically, and that they wanted to repeat this discussion at least 3 times before the next election so that they could continue to damage him politically by shouldering blame for the massive public debt onto him. I simply don’t see how Obama saying “If you don’t damage me politically, I’ll damage myself politically and make you look like saviors of the Republic” would have done him any good.
That being said, I’m still 100% sure he could have played this better.
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I do not see how you can know that invocation of the 14th would be politically disastrous. It would have been bold and assertive, and would have put the “ore party on it’s heels.
No time here, but Obama could easily have played a better game. Given thatch is surrounded by the best and brightest,it is easy to speculate thatbhe is doing what he is doing with full knowledge of the impacts.
That, and why even assume that he is anymore than the face of a massive apparatus.
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But here’s the deal – at the end of the day, most Americans, when asked, didn’t want the debt ceiling raised. They don’t understand the issue like you and I do. They don’t understand that the checks have already been written. More than half of Americans who are on some form of Government assistance don’t even know they’re getting Government assistance.
So very few of the 60% of people who didn’t support raising the debt ceiling in the first place would appreciate the President bypassing Congress in order to do so. It clearly would have been the best thing for the country, but Republicans would have played it up as some kind of Dictatorial move – and that shit would have sold to the public, because the fact that their Social Security checks were still coming through as a result wouldn’t even register to them.
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It’s a weird dynamic in the US wherein it is assumed that If a democrat acts as democrats are perceived, that there will be backlash. That’s framing. If democrats acted like Democrats, they’d be wildly popular. But they can’t and so fall back on “moving toward the center”, which is in realty “‘moving away from the center”. They have to do this, as their constituency is money, and so use the idea that the “center” is right wing to cover their asses. Obama is in the low 40’s. He’d be in the sixties if he would be a man. Yes, America is low information, but sensibility is there.
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I think you give Americans too much credit. But it’d be pretty cool if you were right.
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They know things even if they don”t have words. These are concepts, not taught in school. Like Orwell’s Newspeak, the words have been taken away, so the idea cannot be expressed. “Health care” means private health insurance, and since we have all fought with those slimes, we know that it is not a good thing. When polled, Americans always want something better, and the words “single payer” represent that idea. They don’t know the details, they just know “better”. So when published polls are done, they add an “educational” premise: “Would you support single payer if you knew that puppies would be skinned alive?” Then support goes down.
Americans are deeply indoctrinated and not stupid. The words are not available to express othe thoughts.
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