Words. For Your Consideration...
"For months, anxious Democrats have been asking why Barack Obama couldn't be more like Bill Clinton, their last successful president. Now Obama has gone and done something Clintonian by striking a compromise with Republicans to extend high-income tax cuts, and his own party's liberals are furiously accusing him of betraying their ideals.
That should come as no great surprise. Liberals often accused Clinton of the same sin — a bit of history many Democrats appear to have forgotten.
...Obama cut a deal. He gave the Republicans the continued tax cuts they wanted, even though he had campaigned against them as too expensive. In exchange, he got an extension of his own tax breaks for lower- and middle-income workers, plus a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits.
It was a Clintonian exercise in practical politics: He abandoned one of his most fervently argued positions, but the result was that he probably improved his own political standing in both the short term and the long term.
...If this deal survives, he's just won something that seemed well out of reach: a new economic stimulus package.
...Obama and his aides acknowledge that the deal they struck is far from their ideal. But they say they are doing what the country needs most — giving the economy a better chance to recover. "When you're at war, you fire the bullets that you have," his chief economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, said.
They're also doing what independent voters — the ones who gave Obama his big majority in 2008 — say they want: show some willingness to compromise. For a president seeking reelection, there are worse things than being criticized by "the professional left,"..."
No comments:
Post a Comment