Give thanks for the “We Are Wisconsin” protest movement for starting a political earthquake that woke America up to the Republican campaign to crush the labor movement. Same goes for “We Are Ohio,” for their inspiring victory in smashing SB5.
Do read Dana Milbank’s WaPo column on wingnut Sen. Jon Kyl, poster-boy for GOP obstructionism, and thank God he’s retiring.
Also at the Post, Fareed Zakaria’s column “Be thankful — sensible solutions do exist for U.S. problems” cites “a groundswell for deeper political reform” as cause for optimism about America’s future.
A little gratitude is in order for the San Antonio federal court, which proposed a new redistricting map in which three additional Texas state legislative districts would have people of color as majorities. If the ruling holds up in a Supreme Court review, Dems will have an edge in winning back control of the state legislature.
Give thanks, Dems, for still-growing polarization and disunity within the GOP. As Hunter puts it at Daily Kos, “A secret Republican group bent on defeating a Republican because that Republican isn’t seen as ideologically insane enough to truly represent their crazy-ass party?…The ideological hoops you have to jump through these days in order to be considered a true conservative have become too numerous to count…Now you’re not a “true” conservative unless you want to roll back eighty years of government, replace the Constitution with the Ten Commandments and fire illegal immigrants out of a cannon into an electrified alligator-filled lake of molten sulfur.”
Be thankful, very thankful, for YouTube, the peoples’ video forum, which empowers everyone to make political ads like this one, or this one.
Progressive Dems can give thanks for Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders, for keeping the populist torch blue-hot, as Scott Thill explains in his Alternet post, “10 Great Things To Be Thankful For in 2011.”
Give it up also for Occupy Wall St., for putting economic inequality on the front burner, with a special nod to the brave younguns of UC-Davis for showing America what courageous, disciplined nonviolence looks like.
And please don’t forget to express a little appreciation for MSNBC for providing significant week-night air-time for strong progressive voices like Maddow, Schultz, O’Donnell, Sharpton and Matthews, something I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime on any major network.

In his post at The Atlantic, “A Blueprint for Winning the White House in 2012,” Ronald Browstein discusses the Teixeira/Halpin study we cited in Tomasky’s analysis. Brownstein flags the study as “a comprehensive demographic and geographic roadmap to the 2012 presidential campaign that political junkies of all ideological stripes will want to keep close at hand.” Here’s some of Brownstein’s take:

In their new paper, The Path to 270, the two correctly lay out, I believe, the critical dynamics that will likely tip the balance in both the Electoral College and popular vote next year….Some Democrats fear (and Republicans hope) that even if more minorities and college-plus whites turn out to vote in 2012, they won’t increase as a share of the overall electorate because so many older and blue-collar whites will turn out to vote against Obama in 2012, just as they did in 2010. That will be a critical variable.
…Obama could more easily survive reduced margins among his most favorable groups if those same groups cast a larger proportion of all the votes….Assuming the minority vote unfolds as they project, Teixeira and Halpin calculate that Obama could still win a popular vote majority if he maintains his 47 percent share among college educated whites, even if non-college whites stampede toward the GOP as overwhelmingly as they did in 2010 (when Republicans captured 63 percent of them, up from 58 percent in 2008). Alternately, they argue, Obama could still maintain a narrow popular vote majority if he attracts three-fourths of minorities and loses college whites and non-college whites by the same margins John Kerry did against George W. Bush in 2004. (Kerry’s deficit with each group was about five percentage points larger than Obama’s against John McCain in 2008.)
“In summary,” they write, “given solid, but not exceptional, performance among minority voters, Obama’s re-election depends on either holding his 2008 white college-graduate support, in which case he can survive a landslide defeat of 2010 proportions among white working-class voters, or holding his slippage among both groups to around 2004 levels, in which case he can still squeak out a victory.”

Brownstein cautions that “recent polls suggest that at least on first impression, Mitt Romney has a much stronger chance than his GOP rivals of peeling off significant numbers of those upscale whites, who probably represent Obama’s last line of defense in 2012.” He quotes Teixeira and Halpin’s conclusion that the election is likely to be about demographics vs. economics.
Demographics may indeed be destiny in 2012, and if Obama gets a bit of a break on the economy, it could be very good news for Democrats.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Three questions emerge from the collapse of the super committee. First and least, what will be the immediate political fall-out? Second, will there be other occasions to put broad fiscal issues on the table, or are we condemned to inaction until 2013? And finally, how should President Obama respond?
On the first question, Americans were more inclined to blame Republicans than Democrats for this summer’s debt ceiling fiasco, and the early returns suggest that this trend is continuing with regard to the super committee. A Quinnipiac survey released November 21 showed than 44 percent of voters blamed Republicans for the super committee’s failure, versus 38 percent who blamed Obama and the Democrats. Independents broke along similar lines, 44 to 35 percent.
Not all the news was good for Democrats, however: 49 percent of voters favored an agreement based on spending cuts only (the Republican position) versus 39 percent who wanted some tax increases in the mix as well. Independents felt the same way, by a narrower 45 to 41 margin.
Voters with college degrees favored a mix of tax increases and spending cuts (52-41), as did voters from households with annual incomes of $100,000 or more (49-43). By contrast, voters without college degrees opposed tax increases by a margin of more than 20 points, as did more than 50 percent of all voters with household incomes under $100,000.
In short, the Democratic position is supported by upscale professionals, while the Republican position commands the lion’s share of a downscale, less educated populist coalition. This raises an intriguing question: What happens if the Republicans select as their presidential nominee a man without noticeable populist appeal to oppose an incumbent who has run poorly among them since the beginning of his quest for the presidency?
The failed budget negotiations may not be the end of the matter, however, because two scenarios could bring the parties back to the table. In the first place, the prospect of an additional $600 billion in defense cuts dismays many Republicans and not a few Democrats, including Obama’s outspoken Secretary of Defense. But the majority of congressional Democrats prefer sequestration to the alternatives, and Obama has strongly suggested that he won’t go along with the unraveling of automatic cuts. If the president is prepared to hang tough, in other words, he may spark a conflict between pro-defense and anti-tax Republicans. (Making matters even more interesting, many Republicans are both.) By using the defense cuts trigger as leverage, the president might be able to force budget negotiations involving a different, more flexible group of participants.
There’s also another, grimmer route back to the bargaining table, of course: The market could force the hands of the politicians. The events of the past six months have further weakened international confidence in U.S. governing institutions. Political risk analysis is something Americans used to do about foreign countries; now it’s something foreign analysts do about ours. It’s not hard to imagine a sequence of downgrades and shifts by foreign investors away from the dollar that could make continued partisan gridlock appear increasingly unaffordable. To be sure, some Republicans might hold out in the belief that a collapsing economy would assure victory in November. But that’s risky and would prove counterproductive if persuadable voters came to believe that Republicans were rooting for economic failure.
So in the face of all this, what should Obama do? He will be tempted to put the fiscal debate in neutral and run his 2012 campaign against Republican obstructionism. No doubt his political advisors will be telling him to preserve bright lines and sharp contrasts between himself and his Republican opponent in key areas such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and taxes.
This is the default position, and it could help Obama narrowly prevail next November. But the president should ask himself what a victory gained on this basis would be worth: What would he be able to accomplish in a second term? After all, his first term has shown that neither political party can impose its will on the other. Unless he were to win a victory as large as FDR in 1936 or LBJ in 1964 (and there’s no prospect of that), his second-term choices reduce to two: continuing gridlock or a new formula for doing the people’s business across party lines.
To that end, the alternative–higher risk, higher reward–strategy is for Obama to offer a much more specific program than he has up to now, making clear how he would combine stimulus over the next year or two with a plan to place the budget on a sustainable course by the end of the decade. That would mean organizing his 2012 State of the Union and budget proposal around two issues–bold new measures to spur consumption and job creation, coupled with a long-term budget plan that combines the best features of the Bowles-Simpson and Domenici-Rivlin plans.
This may sound like unconvincing boiler-plate: What bold new growth measures? Well, here’s an idea ripped from an article by Adam Posen:

Central banks and governments can engage in forms of coordinated action that will target the burden of past debts that is hanging over the global economy. In the United States, that means resolving the distressed mortgage debt that is weakening our financial system and reducing labor mobility, thereby constraining not only our growth but also our ability to grow. It is time for the Federal Reserve and elected officials to jointly tackle that housing debt.

Posen is the latest in a lengthening list of leading economists across the ideological spectrum to finger mortgage debt as the core of our failure to recover and grow briskly enough to bring down unemployment. If elites can’t figure out how to fix this problem, average Americans will pay the price. Conversely, nothing would do more to benefit working Americans. Is the president prepared to take the lead? And if he does, will anyone follow?

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Rebutting the main argument in Doug Schoen and Patrick Caddell’s latest travesty of an op-ed column (“The Hillary Moment,” in Monday’s Wall Street Journal) would be a pretty egregious example of shooting fish in a barrel. Their idea that Barack Obama should abruptly shut down his re-election campaign so that Democrats can run the Secretary of State is both ludicrous and pointless, aside from the fact that neither of these two Fox Democrats comes to the topic in good faith.
On the other hand, Schoen and Caddell build their dumb and disingenuous argument on a premise that is accepted in better company than their own: that if Obama wins with a “negative campaign” focusing on the extremism of the Republican Party, he will make his second term a shambles, marked only by increased partisanship as insulted conservatives refuse to cooperate with his agenda. But this premise is as equally flawed as the other arguments the duo put forward. Win or lose, the kind of Obama campaign that Schoen and Caddell bemoan may, in fact, be the only way to end the polarization and gridlock and make governing in Washington possible again.
To begin, it’s far from clear why conservatives would be offended by the claim that they represent a very different governing philosophy than the one put forward by President Obama. Indeed, it’s exactly what they say. Aside from their fatuous claims that the cautious centrist Obama represents something new and dangerously leftist in the Democratic Party, the prevailing conservative belief is that their own party had “abandoned conservative principles” up until 2009, and made big gains in 2010 precisely because a previously hidden majority of Americans were mobilized to vote for a Tea Party-influenced GOP that was finally loud, proud, and consistent about its ideology.
If conservatives are right about the likely outcome of an election representing a “choice, not an echo” (to adopt the title of Phyllis Schlafly’s famous book from the Goldwater campaign, which became an abiding slogan of the conservative movement), nothing should please them more than a “negative” Obama campaign that calls attention to their party’s hard-earned ideological rigor.
Besides, we already have an excellent example of a president who ran on a message of bipartisanship–Obama in 2008–and we all saw how well that worked out for him. There’s no reason on earth to believe an Obama campaign based on constant appeals to bipartisanship, if successful, would work any better to produce actual bipartisanship than the constant appeals to bipartisanship the president made during his first electoral campaign.
In fact, it’s reasonably clear in retrospect that one significant source of the current partisan gridlock in Washington is that Obama’s 2008 campaign was insufficiently negative to yield the kind of mandate to govern that Republicans (and for that matter, dissident Democrats) could not ignore. Yes, Obama campaigned on a platform that included precisely the kind of major policy initiatives he has tried to implement in office, most notably universal health coverage and a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. But in the post-election period, Republicans and many “neutral” pundits insisted on dismissing everything Obama had said during the campaign other than his promise to overcome partisan gridlock, interpreted as meeting the GOP at least half-way on every subject regardless of how rapidly they moved to the right. Had Obama spent much of 2008 attacking conservative ideology as inherently misguided and out of line with the views and values of the country, his resounding victory would have discredited the popular conservative idea that a “center-right nation” had decided Obama might be a better vehicle for reining in big government than the feckless big-spender Bush or the RINO McCain.
That’s why, if a second Obama term is to amount to much of anything, it’s important that he make the policy choices facing the country as clear as is humanly possible. And yes, that means comparative–which is by necessity partially negative–campaigning, rather than some placid demand that voters judge his record in an up-or-down vote that does not take into account the kind of politicians and policies they would thereby elevate to power. And even if he is doomed to lose, he owes it to the country to keep constant pressure on the GOP to make its positive policy agenda as explicit as possible. Under such pressure, it’s possible a nominee like Mitt Romney would disappoint the Republican Tea Party base by foreswearing highly destructive courses of action and embracing positions that involve something more than a demand that Democrats unconditionally surrender.
Moreover, Obama has a moral obligation to remind voters that the presidential election is not, as a simple matter of fact, a referendum, but a decision for and against two candidates, two parties, two philosophies, two agendas, two prospective Supreme Courts, two prospective foreign policies, two views of economic inequality, two attitudes towards the very wealthy and the very poor, and two concepts of the very purpose of government. Americans unhappy with life in the United States who vote against Obama next November will not simply be registering their unhappiness with the status quo, but will be voting for policies ranging from the abandonment of reproductive rights and progressive taxation to the proposition that anyone rich enough to be regarded as a “job creator” should be exempt from accountability to the public for much of anything.
Of course, thanks to the obstructive power of minority parties in Washington, a comparative election will not necessarily empower the winners of either the presidential or the congressional elections to govern effectively. But it’s far more likely to produce accountability for winners and losers alike, hastening the day when the country is not lurching from one status quo referendum to another with each cycle’s losers choosing to deny the winner any sort of mandate. So let’s hear it for “negative campaigning,” if it offers Americans an opportunity to give Washington some clear direction.

Writing in the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky has a post up which deserves attention from the Obama campaign. His first sentence alone stands as a ringing reality-check:

Well, now that it’s official that bipartisan compromise has no future in Washington, it’s time for President Obama to put aside once and for all the idea of playing patty-cake with these people and instead focus ruthlessly on getting to 270 electoral votes…

From there, Tomasky dismisses the either/or argument for NC+VA+CO vs. rust belt electoral vote strategies as “silly,” and urges Obama to go for both. He then plugs an important new strategy paper by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, “The Path to 270: Demographics Versus Economics in the 2012 Election,” summarizing the gist of the paper: “Obama isn’t going to get his 2008 levels of the white vote. But he can’t quite absorb white-vote totals that look like 2010. And he is going to have to fight hard, and smart, to keep them closer to the former than the latter.” Tomasky continues,

Demographically, everything is moving Obama’s way. The study largely splits the electorate into three groups: minorities; white college-educated voters (WCEs); and the white-working class (WWC), which is defined here and usually as whites without a college degree, which for a range of reasons is the best way to identify that group for voting purposes…
The minority share of the electorate was 26 percent in 2008. It’s likely to be 28 percent in 2012. The white working class will continue to shrink. It will make up 3 percent less of the electorate than it did in 2008, dropping from 39 percent to 36 percent. White college graduates will gain 1 percent, from 35 to 36.
…Obama took 80 percent of the minority population (26 percent of the country) in 2008. Teixeira and Halpin “conservatively” estimate that his share of the minority vote will go down to 75–basically from less enthusiasm, especially from nonblack minority-group voters. But that decline still translates into an ever-so-slightly-higher percentage of the overall vote (21 percent to 20.8 percent), because the voting pool has expanded. So Obama can suffer some decline in margins among minority groups without it being remotely fatal.
More strikingly, he can absorb significant WWC losses and still win the popular vote. …The authors write that he could replicate John Kerry’s 2004 numbers–losing WCEs by 11 points and the WWC by 23, both more or less smack-dab between the 2008 and 2010 results–and still win the popular vote by 50 to 48.

Turning to the electoral college, Tomasky notes that “The authors say that Obama’s core states add up to 186 EVs, and the GOP’s, 191. They identify 12 states that are going to decide the winner…” Tomasky adds,

…He did better among white working-class voters than among white college-educated voters–that’s right, better!–in Michigan and Iowa. And he won them in Wisconsin. Yet he lost WWCs horribly in Pennsylvania (but in 2012, WWCs will make up 5 percent less of the electorate). In the new South states, meanwhile, he did nearly as badly among WCEs as among WWCs–for example, in North Carolina he got 33 percent of the WWCs and 38 percent of the WCEs. Only a huge minority vote won him those states.
…He is going to have to assemble different coalitions from battleground state to battleground state around a message that can rally segments of all three groups. For all their differences, there is one thing almost all members of those three groups have in common. They’re part of the 99 percent. The authors want to see “a sustained posture of defending the middle class, supporting popular government programs, and calling for a more equitable tax distribution.” Sounds good to me.

And with the Republican presidential candidates doubling down on their image as rigid enemies of all three of those priorities, the President’s strategy for re-election now clear.

When Alabama enacted the nation’s most draconian law forcing law enforcement officers and school administrators to become immigration cops, you had to figure it was just a matter of time before it produced some consequences that the brave nativist legislators responsible for this travesty might come to regret. For some, the “uh oh” moment might have occurred when it became apparent that many millions of dollars worth of spring crops were rotting in the fields because no one was there to do the backbreaking work of harvesting them.
But now Alabama is coming to grips with an even more richly ironic bit of blowback: a German Mercedes executive was arrested and briefly sent to the slammer in Tuscaloosa after failing to produce a passport when his rental car was pulled over. As you may know, Tuscaloosa is near the site of a large Mercedes plant that Alabama secured in 1993 after giving away a big chunk of the state’s revenue base in abatements and other subsidies. It is the golden calf of the South’s frenzied pursuit of foreign auto plants in recent decades, and more generally, of the region’s sad return to smokestack-chasing, corporate-subsidizing economic development strategies.
So in Alabama, locking up a Mercedes exec as a funny-looking furriner is sort of the functional equivalent of the Swiss Guards arresting the Pope on suspicion that he might vandalize the Sistine Chapel.
Since Alabama lawmakers have not been moved by the human and economic tragedy of thousands of productive farm and construction workers leaving the state thanks to its immigration law, perhaps this farce involving the all-powerful “job creator” from Germany will finally turn some heads.

Indiana has been trending red in polls this year. But it’s beginning to look like Hoosier GOP leaders have been infected with the lemming virus that has driven their Ohio and Wisconsin brethren to the edge of the abyss. Republicans are now preparing to re-introduce so-called “right-to-work” legislation in the upcoming session, according to Mark Guarino’s Monitor report.
Marian Wang explains “Uncoordinated Coordination: Six Reasons Limits on Super PACs Are Barely Limits at All” at Propublica.org.
In his article, “When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?,” New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait wonders if liberal expectations have gotten a little unrealistic, since every Democratic President is a disappointment to progressives. Says Chait: “…Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president–indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious–but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president–either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president. ”
Congratulations are in order for Demos, on reaching a milestone — helping one million voters in five states — Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia and Illinois fill out voter registration forms since 2007, and implement the oft-neglected section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which requires public agencies to assist voters.
The GOP’s “voter fraud’ follies get their due in Ryan J. Reilly’s “GOP New Mexico Sec of State Finds Tiny Fraction Of The Voter Fraud She Alleged” at Talking Points Memo. According to Reilly, “New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran said earlier this year that her state had a “culture of corruption” and referred 64,000 voter registration records to police that she thought were possible cases of voter fraud. Now a new report from her office proves she was completely right, 0.0296875 percent of the time…”
The Hill’s Bob Cusack has some interesting scorekeeping in his post at The Hill, “Winners and losers emerge from supercommittee’s partisan stalemate‬.” Cusack sees it as particularly good news for President Obama: “Without a doubt, the debt panel’s flop helps his cause…In the coming weeks, Obama and congressional Democrats will go on the offensive on extending the payroll tax cuts and unemployment insurance, two issues that were expected to be taken off the table by the supercommittee.
Gene Robinson isn’t having any of the false equivalency Koolaid regarding the Super Committee’s big flunk in his WaPo column, “Robinson: Republican obstinacy doomed the supercommittee.”
It’s always fun when a Republican strategy memo is published to the dismay of its authors, all the more so when the authors include two former members of Speaker Boehner’s staff now working as lobbyists. The memo in question is essentially a pitch from the Geldug, Clark, Lytle and Cranford lobbying firm to the American Bankers Association. The lobbyists would provide a survey of attitudes towards OWS and big banks and an analysis of OWS leaders and backers, and strategy papers on coalition planning and advertising — all for a mere $850K. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes broke the story (video clip exclusive here), MSNBC has the memo here and John Reed of OpEd news puts it in perspective here. One stated goal in the memo: “to provide cover for political figures who defend the industry.”
Upper of the day: Meg Handley’s “5 Reasons the Economy Will Be Better in 2012” at U.S. News Politics.
Michael Bailey and Forrest Maltzman attempt a data driven analysis to answer the question in their American Prospect post title “Will the Supreme Court Overturn Obamacare?” The theory seems a little dicey, but Dems should like their prediction: “here is ours: 6-3 or 7-2 to uphold the law.”

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Inside-the-beltway pundits have already begun to decry the so-called “failure” of the super committee to hammer out an agreement that would have almost certainly resulted in huge cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits for ordinary Americans.
Those ordinary Americans should applaud the Democrats’ refusal to buckle to Republican demands for Draconian cuts in these critical middle class programs.
In addition, Democrats insisted that Congress’ top priority at this moment should be creating jobs, and that the only fair way to bring down future deficits is to end tax breaks for the wealthy and, once again, require that millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share.
Of course it should come as no surprise that Republican negotiators were completely unwilling to allow meaningful increases in the share of taxes paid by millionaires and billionaires — whose slice of the overall economic pie has exploded over the last three decades. They were unwilling to increase top tax rates to the Clinton-era levels of 39.6% — much less the 50% marginal tax rate millionaires paid during first administration of that well-known “socialist” Ronald Regan.
After all, the Republicans have one central mission — to act as guard dogs for incomes of the one percent. Enhancing the wealth of the wealthiest Americans is in fact the core goal of current leadership of the Republican Party. They are willing to battle through hell and back to defend the riches of the Koch brothers of the world.
Never mind that two-thirds of Americans believe that taxing millionaires is the best way to reduce the federal deficit. Never mind that 70% say they oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare to cut the deficit.
In fact, most Americans are down right militant about not cutting Social Security, Medicare to reduce the deficit.
In a recent poll by the Republican polling firm, American Viewpoint, and the Democratic firm, Lake Research Partners, 49% — including 42% of Republicans — said they would be more likely to vote Members of Congress who voted against cutting Social Security and Medicare as part of a Super Committee proposal (18% were less likely).
And 54% said they would be less likely to vote for a Member of Congress who supported cutting Social Security and Medicare as part of a budget deal (14% more likely) — including 65% of independents and 42% of Republicans.
According to a recent memo by Anzalone Research, a poll by Pulse Opinion Research, on behalf of The Hill newspaper, finds:

… a greater than 4:1 margin who believes the middle class is shrinking (67%) as opposed to growing (14%). They also find a majority of Americans (55%) identify “income inequality in the U.S.” as a “major problem”, with another 19% declaring it “somewhat of a problem.” … an ABC/Washington Post Poll shows 60% of Americans want the “federal government to pursue policies to reduce the gap between the wealthy and less well-off Americans”, compared to 35% who believe the government should not pursue such policies.

And it’s no wonder.
Four hundred families control as much wealth today as 150 million of their fellow Americans — roughly half of the population.
In fact, the top one percent, control as much wealth as the bottom 90%. That’s not democracy.
And when it comes to income, Anzalone’s memo notes that:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans reached a record high last year. The Gini measure is a statistical measure of income inequality and the Census Bureau also finds it reaching record levels…

By rejecting the Republican proposals in the Super Committee, Democrats were simply expressing the views — and standing up for the interests — of the vast majority of Americans.
What’s more, they were standing up for the future of the American middle class.
Long-term, widely shared prosperity requires that the incomes of everyday people increase in proportion to their increasing productivity. If it doesn’t, they simply won’t have the money to buy the increased number of goods and services that they themselves have the ability to produce. That is the formula for economic stagnation and the end of the American dream.
The inability of the super committee to reach an agreement is not a reflection on the “intransigence” of both sides and “unwillingness” to compromise. The far right that now dominates the Republican Party insists on positions that fall far outside of mainstream views of everyday American voters. They want changes in the American social contract that will destroy the middle class.
They are intent on continuing the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the top 1%. They demand the elimination of Medicare and want to substitute a publicly funded private insurance program in its place that will raise average out of pocket costs for retirees by $6,000 a year. They want major cuts in Social Security benefits. They want to “reform” the tax code so it would permanently lock in the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and go even further to lower tax rates for the 1%.
These are not issues that should be subject to “compromise” — in a democracy they should be the subject of elections.
What’s next for the battle over the role of government?
The Republicans will no doubt rush to eliminate the provision of their own deal to raise the debt ceiling, that required the Defense Department to absorb 50% of the $1.2 trillion automatic “sequestration” of spending that begins in January 2013. That provision was supposed to force them to compromise on their inflexible opposition against more government revenue — but it didn’t work. Now they want to change the rules.
But that isn’t going to happen. The president has indicated, in no uncertain terms, that he will veto any attempt to eliminate the Defense Department from the sequestration trigger.
That doesn’t mean that sometime during the next 13 months there won’t be a deal that modifies the sequestration requirement. But to be viable any deal will have to be balanced, and pass through the regular order of the Congress — not on some Congressional “fast track” procedure that gives the upper hand to Republicans.
The right wing chose to use the debt ceiling as the leverage to force the round of deficit wars that will conclude when the mandate of the Super Committee expires. That battleground gave them a huge tactical advantage.
Progressives’ best hope for a long-term budget deal that reflects our values is to insist that the next battle take place as the Bush Tax Cuts are scheduled to expire in the lame duck session following the November elections. That will be the moment when we have the greatest leverage to drive the best bargain for ordinary Americans.
In addition, I believe that the outcome of the elections themselves will completely change the political dialogue in America. The relative importance of jobs programs, the importance of assuring that millionaires pay their fair share, and the importance of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — will all be litigated in the next election. Progressives have the high political ground on every one.
In the meantime, Congress must refocus its full attention on the real crisis facing our country — the need to create jobs, put Americans back to work and defend the middle class.