OpinionRepublican crazies scuttle deal with Obama
As long as John Boehner's party is controlled by extremists, no deal is possible
A few years back, there was a boom in the US in poker television - shows in which you got to watch the betting and bluffing of expert card players. Since then, however, viewers seem to have lost interest. But I have a suggestion: instead of featuring poker experts, why not a show featuring poker incompetents - people who fold when they have a strong hand or don't know how to quit while they're ahead?
On second thought, that show already exists. It's called US budget negotiations, and it's now in its second episode.
The first ran in 2011, as President Barack Obama made his first bid to cut a long-run fiscal deal - a so-called Grand Bargain - with House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner. Obama held a fairly weak hand, after a midterm election in which Democrats took a beating. Nonetheless, the concessions he offered were breathtaking: he was willing to accept huge spending cuts, and a rise in the Medicare eligibility age, in return for a vague promise of higher revenue without any increase in tax rates.
This deal, if implemented, would have been a huge Republican victory, deeply damaging both programmes dear to Democrats and their political brand. But it never happened. Why? Because Boehner and his party couldn't bring themselves to accept even a modest rise in taxes. And their intransigence saved Obama from himself.
Now the game is on again - but with Obama holding a far stronger hand. He and his party won a solid victory in this year's election. And the legislative clock is also very much in their favour. All the tax cuts implemented under his predecessor George W. Bush are scheduled to expire at the end of the month.
Yet last week progressives suddenly had the sinking feeling that it was 2011 all over again, as the Obama administration made a budget offer that, while far better than the disastrous deal it was willing to make the last time around, still involved giving way on issues where it had promised to hold the line - perpetuating a substantial portion of the high-income Bush tax cuts, in effect cutting Social Security benefits by changing the inflation adjustment.
And this was an offer, not a deal. Are we about to see another round of the president negotiating with himself, snatching policy and political defeat from the jaws of victory?