Time for Republicans to get rid of the Romneys and Trumps

By Ben Cohen: It’s fairly clear that the Republican Party is in a state of serious disarray after getting hammered in the general election. The once unified party has begun to crack at the seams, fracturing over issues that were once untouchable cornerstones of Republican ideology. Up for grabs are women’s rights, the environment, foreign policy and now even taxation. Which strand of Republicanism will define the future of the party? Will the hardliners – the libertarians, religious fundamentalists, and tea party activist win the day, or will moderates find a way to bring the party under control and present a more sensible brand of conservatism going forward?

One thing is clear – what they are doing now is not working, and it’s going to get much, much worse. They are facing a demographic nightmare and an evolving public consciousness that free market capitalism and tax cuts are not the solution to the nation’s woes. Republicans are going to have to think out of the box if they want long term electoral success, and many of their ideas won’t be popular.

While the Left should be happy that the Republicans are a mess, it isn’t good for democracy to have one party so removed from reality that there is little point engaging with them. So here are some suggestions for top brass at GOP central – a five step program to get their house in order and get back to being relevant in a rapidly changing country that is leaving them behind. The steps we’ve outlined won’t be easy to implement, but they are necessary if the Republicans want to attract top talent and capture the imagination of the public:

1. Publicly disown prominent media blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity. Moderate Republicans need to take control of the GOP messaging quickly and aggressively, and that begins with creating a very visible rift between the party and the Fox News propaganda complex. This will be extremely painful to do and the backlash will be vicious and prolonged. But Limbaugh et al. are paper tigers with no substance behind their rhetoric and Republicans will have to gamble that in the long term, honesty and reality will win. As Andrew Sullivan stated on Bill Maher’s ‘Real Time’, “The first conservative who will be the future of that [Republican] party will be the one who says Rush Limbaugh does not speak for the Republican Party, he is a poison on the discourse…..You see the media industrial complex on the right is so lucrative, they don’t want to lose him and it is now controlling a political party. That has to be severed, Fox News has to be demonized, has to be cut off.”

2. Join the President in opposing Citizens United. There are already signs that Republicans are aware of just how corrosive and dangerous the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was, and there needs to be a unified effort to reverse the decision and ban unlimited outside funding of political campaigns. As Jonathan Chait wrote during the Republican primary:

The Republican elite is justifiably terrified at the prospect of Newt Gingrich capturing the nomination. Gingrich, as I’ve argued, is riding the wave of revulsion and contempt for President Obama that this same Establishment has stoked for three years. But his campaign is also blowback to the party Establishment in another, more mechanical way. His campaign is surviving entirely as a result of the Citizens United ruling, decried by liberals and celebrated by conservatives, which allows unlimited campaign expenditures, as long as they’re not coordinated with campaigns.

Unlimited funding means that corporate interests will almost always win, or at least drag politics in a direction that works against the long term interests of the Republican Party. The GOP needs to change its economic platform if it wants to remain relevant because the era of Romney style vulture capitalism is getting increasingly harder to sell.

3. Use traditional Republicanism as the basis for a new economic ideology and completely disown Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Traditional conservatism doesn’t bow to markets – it believes in small government, but also believes in curtailing the power of big business. There is a Libertarian dictatorship within the Republican Party, and it has stifled debate making change almost impossible. Market fanaticism has ensured the party has had no new ideas in over 30 years, and this cannot go on. There are Republicans not wedded to the dictates of deregulated markets and they need to be given a more prominent platform. Joe Scarborough represents a type of conservatism that has been long dead in America and has the guts to actually tell the truth about who owns the party. We need to hear more from people like him.

4. Stop lying. The Republican Party has a terrible track record with telling the truth. Mitt Romney’s run at the Presidency exemplified modern Republican politics perfectly – it was based on lying about literally everything, from abortion to taxation and global warming. And in particular, Republicans have lied about President Obama. The Republicans have waged a completely dishonest campaign against the President, promoting an insidious mythology that he is some sort of closet communist Muslim who hates America. There are many, many issues that the President can be criticized for – drone killings, the NDAA, wire tapping, his ties to Wall st etc etc – all issues that true conservatives should be seriously concerned about. Instead, the Republican Party has created a make believe Obama and attacked that making them look idiotic in the process.

5. Embrace environmentalism. This could be key to redefining the Republican Party. It sounds far fetched and so contradictory to current Republicanism that dismisses global warming and regards environmentalists as subhuman (Ann Coulter once said, “The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it’s yours”), but it could capture an entire new demographic. There are non political Evangelical Christians who would line up behind them if they got serious, activists who would jump ship immediately if the Republicans outflanked the Democrats, and a new generation that is disenchanted with both parties inactivity on the issue.

Do you have any suggestions for the Grand Old Party, or do you think it best they stay confused and politically neutered? Comment below and we’ll post the best suggestions!

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

David Axelrod: The brains behind Obama's re-election (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Daily Beast has done a fascinating write up of a talk given by David Axelrod, President Obama’s chief re-election strategist, on the serious missteps made by the Romney team:

Offering a lengthy dissection of the campaign, David Axelrod told a Chicago audience that he was “a bit surprised that super PACS which spent an unbelievable amount of money” didn’t hit television and radio with anti-Obama ads until May.

“Our air defenses weren’t ready,” he said, alluding to his side’s early lack of resources. “They gave us a pass, for whatever reason.”

At the same time, he was surprised that a plausible, distinctly positive image of Romney as successful businessman was not central to Romney’s media strategy until late fall. In part he ascribed that to Romney’s “Faustian bargain” to get the Republican nomination and tacking far to the right while also unleashing a barrage of mostly negative ads against GOP primary rivals.

The Obama camp assumed that after Romney sewed up the nomination, he would offer that more upbeat aura in his ads. “They never did that,” Axelrod said at the evening gathering at the University of Chicago.

As for Ryan, Axelrod personally figured former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty would be the choice, possibly Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. His doubts about Ryan were a function of tough-minded views on privatizing Social Security and making significant changes in Medicare.

Axelrod’s assessment is obviously more informed than mine, but I don’t think the strategic errors played the biggest part in Romney’s downfall. Romney’s campaign, right up until the first Presidential debate, was nothing short of disastrous mostly because they had a disastrous candidate; Mitt Romney. At literally every high profile event, Romney would put his foot in it and say something to disconnect himself from the general public. Time and time again he revealed himself to be an out of touch multi millionaire with no concept of how most people in America lived, culminating in the release of the ’47%’ video that should have ended his campaign once and for all.

Then an inexplicable meltdown from the President and a reasonably human performance from Romney on debate night propelled him back into the running, giving him a realistic shot at the Presidency that he did not deserve. Of course Romney’s team made strategic errors, but it probably would not have made a difference. A bad candidate is a bad candidate, and Romney will go down as one of the worst in Republican history.

No amount of negative campaigning could have countered that.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Governor Bobby Jindal: Making the right noise, but not the right policies

By Ben Cohen: Oliver Willis posted a short but insightful piece on his blog over the weekend outlining the Republicans strategy for getting elected. Titled: ‘Conservatives Realize They Have To Lie About Conservatism To Be Elected’, Willis argued that the only way they can get into office is to basically be dishonest about their policies. He wrote:

The only way for conservatism to win a national election in America is for conservatives to pretend to be centrist or even liberal on several key issues. Being against the actual safety net, as conservatives are, is electoral suicide. Being a totalitarian against a woman’s right to choose, is key to yet another double-digit loss among women voters. On issue after issue, the conservative position is in the fringe.

A Republican presidential candidate will only succeed in the future if he does as Bush did: hide his conservatism or disguise it in progressivism. It speaks volumes about just how hollow your ideology truly is if it can’t stand up in the light, but must instead hide in the darkness like a cockroach.

I’ve made this argument before, that the current model of American conservatism is so extreme that the Republicans have had to create a multi million dollar industry around it in order to get the public to vote for them. Again and again Americans are polled as being to the Left of both parties when it comes to actual policies (most Americans believe in universal health care, the preservation of social security, more stringent tax policies for the rich etc) and the Republicans are now so out of whack that their candidates have no choice but to lie in public about what they believe in.

Mitt Romney had absolutely no problem doing an about turn when it came close to actual voting time – he shored up the Republican base with a lot of rhetoric about killing Muslims, curtailing women’s rights and giving everyone tax cuts, then pretended he didn’t say any of the above when debating President Obama face to face.

Luckily for most of the population, the tactic failed. After getting completely hammered, the Republicans are busy going through the process of redefining themselves. But when you look at the action behind the rhetoric, again, there are no tangible changes.

Bobby Jindal publicly rebuked Mitt Romney’s remarks about losing the election because Obama gave things to poor Hispanic women, telling Politico:

“It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that….It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

Needless to say, not many Republicans are out there supporting Kristol on this one. And that’s why their new ideas will be to pretend not to be conservative – the same ones that saw them lose against Obama and will see them lose again in the future.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

See? Look at all that outreach!

The evolution has to include an outreach to women, to Latinos and other minorities and broadening the youth appeal of the party, while spending less time pandering to the crazy fringe. Otherwise the increasingly white rural Christian male base will slowly strangle and kill the party — further infecting it with an archaic 1950s monochromatic necrosis rather than establishing a plan with an eye on the 2050s.

So how are they doing so far?

The Loser. Mitt Romney clearly didn’t recognize one of the main reasons why he lost because in a conference call with donors he, once again, took a gigantic crap all over half of the nation, referring to how the president gave “gifts” to Latinos, women and young people in the form of the DREAM Act, “free contraceptives,” health care and college loan assistance. In other words, the president won the moocher and layabout vote. The 47-Percent thing all over again.

When asked about Romney’s horrendous remarks, Carlos Gutierrez, Romney’s top Hispanic adviser, said, “I was shocked. And frankly I don’t think that’s why Republicans lost the election,” Gutierrez continued, “I don’t know if he understood that he was saying something that was insulting.” Of course he didn’t. Conservative Washington Post contributor Jennifer Rubin wrote that Romney may have used “more grotesque language” to describe Hispanic voters. Yikes! Bill O’Reilly said Romney’s remarks were “right on the money.” Double yikes! Fox News anchor Stuart Varney and bag-of-rocks Brian Kilmeade agreed with O’Reilly. Triple yikes!

Well, so far so good, Republicans. Spectacular outreach effort.

Latino Outreach (Tokenism). But Marco Rubio went to Iowa over the weekend which means he’s running for president in 2016. See? The Republicans love Hispanics! Marco Rubio, for example, who’s Cuban-American. Rush Limbaugh thinks they deserve credit for Rubio, Suzanne Martinez and Allen West — you know, because they’re not white, which means the Republicans are all about the Hispanic, female and African American vote. Get it? That’s a whopping three candidates whose policies are exactly in line with everything those exact same demographic groups find loathsome.

Ohio Republican Fail. It’s difficult to point to women like Condoleezza Rice in an effort to appeal to women and African American voters when the Ohio Republicans are showing off the true identity of the party. Yes, last week the Ohio Republicans voted in committee to de-fund Planned Parenthood, thus restricting access to cancer screenings, mammograms, rape counseling services and, yes, contraceptives. Purely female services. Perhaps by “outreach” the Republicans mean it in the Sean Connery sense.

The Benghazi-Gate Witch Hunt. Back in Washington, DC, increasingly unhinged John McCain, Linsdey Graham and other Republicans are in the process of emphasizing their Connery-style outreach to women and minorities by relentlessly attacking an African American woman, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, for simply repeating the public talking points about Benghazi that were presented to her by the CIA. Furthermore, the Republican obsession about Benghazi isn’t helping the party when it comes to sounding less wackaloon and more sane.

The (not liberal) Economist: “Had Susan Rice gone on the talk shows on September 15th and inaccurately stated that the attackers had been wearing green pants, when in fact their pants had been red, there would be no reason to suspect this to be part of a political “cover-up”, because no American voters could conceivably have cared either way.” Except for McCain and Graham who plan to filibuster Susan Rice’s possible nomination as Secretary of State.

Insurrection over Obamacare. Speaking of wackaloons, nine Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin threatened to arrest any public official who’s caught implementing the federal law known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Can you imagine if any Democrat had threatened to arrest officials who implemented the Patriot Act? Or Medicare Part-D? They would’ve been tarred and feathered and hectored out of office. And rightfully so.

More Latino Outreach. Last week in Arizona, where crazy white people have been demonizing and persecuting Latinos for several years now, endeavored to temper their insane/bigoted reputation by trying to block provisional ballots from being counted in Cochise County, which happens to be predominantly Latino. Yes, while votes were still being counted, Republicans tried to disenfranchise Latino voters.

Seriously? And finally, The Los Angeles Times‘ Charlotte Allen had a fantastic bit of advice for the party yesterday. She wrote, “I’ve got a suggestion for cutting short the GOP angst: Sarah Palin for president in 2016. You think I’m joking? Think again.”

Yep, I absolutely hope she runs and wins the nomination. It’ll prove the evident suspicion that they’ve learned absolutely nothing and that their “outreach” is nothing more than tokenism and pandering.

Now, if the Republicans were smart, they’d take seriously the words of former Bush speechwriter and creator of the “axis of evil” catchphrase David Frum, as well as Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.

Frum, channeling President Eisenhower, said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last week, “Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.” Unfortunately, the only thing holding the party together is the existence of AM talk radio and Fox News — its public relations and marketing aparatus. If anyone in the party makes a serious split from its own echo-chamber, the echo-chamber will absolutely and loudly turn against it like a torch-and-pitchfork mob. Good luck with the divorce, Republicans. You’ve created this monster and it won’t like being ignored.

Jindal, for his part, said, “It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that. It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.” Uh-huh. Jindal hates insulting the intelligence of voters, which is why he deliberately made volcano monitoring and magnetic levitation rail technology sound like sorcery to frighten simpleton Republicans from supporting the stimulus, from which he subsequently requested and received huge game-show sized checks. But I get his point. We’ll see if he acts upon it.

Jindal continued, “The reality is we have to be a party of solutions and not just bumper-sticker slogans but real detailed policy solutions.” What the last two weeks have proved is the Republicans are incapable of this kind of change — at the DNA level they simply can’t put the radical far-right genie back in the bottle. They can’t abandon their anti-choice position or their racially antagonistic white base or any of the rest of their top-shelf positions. Talking about those issues in a different way won’t change what the modern GOP is all about.

It appears as if they’re just swapping the old bumper sticker slogans for slightly newer ones. The necrotic ideas will remain the same.

Keep going, Republicans. You’re doing great!

Subscribe

Bob Cesca's feed

Enter email below:

In an astonishing segment on his show, Bill O’Reilly goes on a rant about ‘far Left’ elements in America that can only be described as an epic bout of cognitive dissonance. The segment starts with O’Reilly plays a clip of himself pre-election stating that:

“20 years ago, President Obama would be roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them, and they want stuff. You’re going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama, overwhelming black vote for Obama, and women will probably break President Obama’s way”.

O’Reilly then argues that the Leftist media spun his words to make him look like a white supremacist. Of course, O’Reilly doesn’t explain what he meant by “They want stuff”, and goes on to accuse the extreme Left of a witch hunt. Hilariously, O’Reilly argues that there are ‘Entire media operations that exist solely to promote ideology’ – a statement so brilliantly hypocritical, it can only be described as Orwellian. I lost the will to watch any more after that one (when I stopped he was bringing out Alan Colmes to provide the Leftist perspective), but you can check out the segment below to get the gist of it:

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

By Chez Pazienza: Can you feel that? Isn’t it nice?

I may be a big fan of new experiences, but there’s nothing quite like returning to your comfort zone, where every minute of every day unfolds a like warm blanket of soothing predictability. Sure, it was entertaining and even, for the briefest of moments, somewhat encouraging to see the Republicans humbly soul-search following the trouncing they received at the polls last week. For a couple of days it seemed like all you heard was a steady stream of self-recrimination and conciliatory language coming from the right. Even as the usual apocalyptic raving and blustery doubling-down on the politics of division and eliminationism went on unabated, for the first time in a very long time these voices were uncharacteristically outnumbered by people at least trying to behave calmly and rationally. Just about everyone of every political stripe was apparently ready to acknowledge that the GOP had lost its way and its historic comeuppance was proof of its lack of viability in a changing America. November 6th was a date with demographic destiny the right shouldn’t have been able to forget.

But hey, that was last week. This week, everything’s back to normal.

Surely by now you’ve heard that rather than going away quietly and consequently aligning himself with the losers of elections past who’ve comported themselves with dignity and class, Mitt Romney is basically confirming for us all in grand fashion the fact that we dodged a serious bullet by not electing him president. In some ways I guess we can be thankful. Yesterday, on a conference call with several of the big money donors to his failed campaign, Romney once again expressed disbelief that he’s not right now at this very moment putting together a transition team to help usher him into the Oval Office come January. He still can’t understand why he didn’t win — although the best reason he can come up with might prove that he’ll never really understand. While talking to those donors, Romney blamed his loss on the “gifts” President Obama was willing to give out to minorities, women and students in an effort to win their vote.

“The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”

If this sounds contemptuously plutocratic, a 180-degree turn from the 180-degree turn he pulled toward the end of his campaign when he tried to disavow his infamous “47%” comments, believe me — it is. With nothing left to lose or gain, the real Romney once again reveals himself, and it’s not pretty. Still, it was to be expected because while Romney admittedly speaks from a rarefied position when it comes to the ability to sociopathically look down one’s nose at the teeming unwashed and their pathetic needs, he didn’t say anything yesterday that guys like the sulking, bitter Bill O’Reilly and the bloated, loudmouthed Rush Limbaugh weren’t saying last week. They were simply balanced, for a change, with introspection from those who realize that disenfranchising half the population — calling them lazy, irresponsible freeloaders — is no way to win a national election.

The voices of reason were probably never going to last but as with 2008 it’s almost shocking the speed with which so many Republicans have returned to a place of outrage and conspiracy, spouting the familiar shibboleths that got them into the mess they’re currently in.

First of all, Fox News, which many expected to at least temper its lunacy for a bit in the interest of trying to move the political party it shills for forward, has jumped fully back into fanciful fear-mongering mode. Not only has it latched onto Romney’s comments as a means of pushing its own version of the bullshit “makers-vs.-takers” meme, but it’s proving that it’s still willing to give a national forum to any idiot with a theory about President Obama sure to stoke the terrors and resentments of its aging white audience. Yesterday alone, a former CIA operative appeared on Fox to make the claim that Obama is “encouraging radicals to act against America’s allies,” and of course it practically goes without saying that it’s been willing to lend legitimacy to the temper tantrum currently being thrown by a handful of breathtakingly stupid secessionists in the wake of the Obama victory (what Hannity has personally dubbed “Secession Fever”).

Yeah, if you thought Fox News was going to calm the fuck down even for a little while — man, did you back the wrong horse. What’s interesting, though, is that for Ailes and Fox News, the decision to continue throwing gasoline on the fires of white fury is strictly a business one. There was, again, a lot of hemming and hawing last week about how conservative media did such a disservice to its audience by reinforcing the epistemic information bubble most of it lives in in the lead-up to the election. But there’s money in blowing that bubble up once again, this time potentially even bigger and stronger, and that’s got to be the primary consideration. Fox News has never been more powerful than when it’s the blaring voice of opposition. The last four years have been a boon to it and I doubt the next four will be any different.

As for the kind of conspiratorial fanaticism we can count on over the next leg of the Obama presidency and now that our brief moment of sanity has passed, well, meet the new birtherism: the election was stolen. Sure, there’s zero evidence whatsoever of any kind of voter fraud — although there’s plenty proof of official and under-the-table GOP voter suppression and intimidation leading up to the election — but since when has that stopped the most unhinged on the right? Still holding on tightly to the alternative reality it was fed by conservative media, those who believe that there’s simply no way Obama could have won again are convinced he didn’t, that a dastardly plot by urban voters and their enablers rigged the game. Again, no evidence, but who needs it when you’ve got unfocused, white-hot rage, suspicion and the absolute faith that you’re right?

So, yeah, secessionists, racists, cries for impeachment, threats of violence, conspiracies everywhere, four years of absolute chaos as a once-respectable political movement gruesomely death-spasms its way inexorably down the road to oblivion.

It’s good to have things back to normal on the right.

Subscribe

Chez Pazienza's feed

Enter email below:

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From AP:

WASHINGTON — Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is telling top donors that President Barack Obama won re-election because of the “gifts” he had already provided to blacks, Hispanics and young voters and because of the president’s effort to paint Romney as anti-immigrant.

“The president’s campaign, if you will, focused on giving targeted groups a big gift,” Romney said in a call to donors on Wednesday. “He made a big effort on small things.”

Romney said his campaign, in contrast, had been about “big issues for the whole country.” He said he faced problems as a candidate because he was “getting beat up” by the Obama campaign and that the debates allowed him to come back.

[...]

Among the “gifts” Romney cited were free health care “in perpetuity,” which he said was highly motivational to black and Hispanic voters as well as for voters making $25,000 to $35,000 a year.

Romney also said the administration’s promise to offer what he called “amnesty” to the children of illegal immigrants – what he termed “the so-called DREAM Act kids” – helped send Hispanics to the polls for Obama.

Subscribe

Chez Pazienza's feed

Enter email below:

Less of this, please (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The looming fight over the ‘fiscal cliff’ promises to be another gigantic sellout of the middle classes and poor. President Obama has talked about a ‘Grand Bargain’ he intends to make with the Republicans in order to stop a set of $1.2 trillion spending cuts and tax hikes that are scheduled to take place on Jan. 1st should Congress not agree on a plan to reduce the deficit. According to most economists, the automatic cuts and tax hikes are very likely to cause a recession, reversing progress made over the past year and a half that has seen economic growth and steady job creation.

As Cenk Uygur writes, Obama has essentially sold out the Democratic base before negotiations have begun:

President Obama has proposed that the Grand Bargain include $4 trillion in savings. He has said over and over again that the ratio would be $3 in spending cuts to $1 in tax increases. This is before his legendarily disastrous negotiating begins. So, let’s do some quick math. According to the president’s own plan that would be $3 trillion in spending cuts, which is significantly higher than the current plan of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts.

Let me add one other fact, if all you do is let the Bush tax cuts expire for people making over $250,000, you would already have $1 trillion in tax increases. And we were told because of this election that was already non-negotiable. That’s what we fought to make sure would happen and the president has guaranteed it. So, what exactly do progressives gain out of this Grand Bargain?

The reality is that this is cost shifting. They are going to move the spending cuts away from defense and on to the middle class and poor by hacking away at Medicare and Medicaid. This is defined as courageous in Washington. What a load of crap. What would be courageous is taking on the rich and the powerful and the large political donors, which is the exact opposite of what’s going to happen.

Uygur hits the nail on the head here – the reality of the ‘Grand Bargain’ is that Republicans get to hold the country to ransom, much like they did with the debt ceiling, and force through savage cuts that will hit the poor and elderly. Obama has yet again started negotiating from the right by outlining cuts to the welfare state and a minor tax hikes for the rich  that would be considered conservative in any other era or country.

Glenn Greenwald (painfully accurately) outlines what the negotiations will most likely look like:

STEP ONE: Liberals will declare that cutting social security and Medicare benefits – including raising the eligibility age or introducing “means-testing” – are absolutely unacceptable, that they will never support any bill that does so no matter what other provisions it contains, that they will wage war on Democrats if they try.

STEP TWO: As the deal gets negotiated and takes shape, progressive pundits in Washington, with Obama officials persuasively whispering in their ear, will begin to argue that the proposed cuts are really not that bad, that they are modest and acceptable, that they are even necessary to save the programs from greater cuts or even dismantlement.

STEP THREE: Many progressives – ones who are not persuaded that these cuts are less than draconian or defensible on the merits – will nonetheless begin to view them with resignation and acquiescence on pragmatic grounds. Obama has no real choice, they will insist, because he must reach a deal with the crazy, evil GOP to save the economy from crippling harm, and the only way he can do so is by agreeing to entitlement cuts. It is a pragmatic necessity, they will insist, and anyone who refuses to support it is being a purist, unreasonably blind to political realities, recklessly willing to blow up Obama’s second term before it even begins.

STEP FOUR: The few liberal holdouts, who continue to vehemently oppose any bill that cuts social security and Medicare, will be isolated and marginalized, excluded from the key meetings where these matters are being negotiated, confined to a few MSNBC appearances where they explain their inconsequential opposition.

STEP FIVE: Once a deal is announced, and everyone from Obama to Harry Reid and the DNC are behind it, any progressives still vocally angry about it and insisting on its defeat will be castigated as ideologues and purists, compared to the Tea Party for their refusal to compromise, and scorned (by compliant progressives) as fringe Far Left malcontents.

STEP SIX: Once the deal is enacted with bipartisan support and Obama signs it in a ceremony, standing in front of his new Treasury Secretary, the supreme corporatist Erskine Bowles, where he touts the virtues of bipartisanship and making “tough choices”, any progressives still complaining will be told that it is time to move on. Any who do not will be constantly reminded that there is an Extremely Important Election coming – the 2014 midterm – where it will be Absolutely Vital that Democrats hold onto the Senate and that they take over the House. Any progressive, still infuriated by cuts to social security and Medicare, who still refuses to get meekly in line behind the Party will be told that they are jeopardizing the Party’s chances for winning that Vital Election and – as a result of their opposition – are helping Mitch McConnell take over control of the Senate and John Boehner retain control of the House.

There’s always hope that Obama will stand his ground, and given his recent hammering of Mitt Romney, he has some political capital to play with. Paul Krugman has written a plea to the President to take a firm stance with the Republicans, and go over the so called fiscal cliff if necessary in order to preserve the President’s standing with his base and save the economy from more unnecessary damage:

President Obama has to make a decision, almost immediately, about how to deal with continuing Republican obstruction. How far should he go in accommodating the G.O.P.’s demands?

My answer is, not far at all. Mr. Obama should hang tough, declaring himself willing, if necessary, to hold his ground even at the cost of letting his opponents inflict damage on a still-shaky economy. And this is definitely no time to negotiate a “grand bargain” on the budget that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory……

This time, nothing very bad will happen to the economy if agreement isn’t reached until a few weeks or even a few months into 2013. So there’s time to bargain.

More important, however, is the point that a stalemate would hurt Republican backers, corporate donors in particular, every bit as much as it hurt the rest of the country. As the risk of severe economic damage grew, Republicans would face intense pressure to cut a deal after all.

Meanwhile, the president is in a far stronger position than in previous confrontations. I don’t place much stock in talk of “mandates,” but Mr. Obama did win re-election with a populist campaign, so he can plausibly claim that Republicans are defying the will of the American people.

I’m not holding out a huge amount of hope for this – while I think Obama has been incredibly crafty at handling the Republicans in certain regards, when it comes to negotiating on the economy, he has consistently fallen short and allowed big business and the Republicans to define the terms of the debate. The tax system in America is already dangerously skewed to reward the rich and punish the poor, making debt reduction and economic growth almost impossible. An exacerbation of the status quo could be horrific. Tax cuts for the rich do not create economic growth or new jobs, and slashing spending on medicare/medicaid and social security does nothing other than make the lives of millions of Americans unbearably difficult. Austerity is a recipe for disaster during a recession (see much of Europe as an example of this), and Obama may well be on the verge of undoing the progress he made during his first term.

The Left has to intelligently hold the President to account here and tell him that he must not yield to Republican demands. There’s no need to self sabotage (as Glenn Greenwald/Jane Hamsher etc are likely to do), but Obama should be forcefully reminded about who put him back into office, and what he needs to do to retain their loyalty.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below: