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ReplyDeleteIn his first term, Obama’s message to the GOP was, “I will meet you halfway.” They refused to budge. His second term message is: “Compromise or pay the political price.”
To the public, the implicit message was: “If you want any of this stuff, I’m going to need a Democratic Congress next time.” When Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, Bill Clinton responded with a long list of small-bore initiatives: gun safety locks, school uniforms, the v-chip, cellphones for citizen patrols, and so forth. Clinton wanted to show that he was still relevant and that he could still accomplish something even with a divided government. Obama, by contrast, has little appetite for legislative hors d’oeuvres. His program is designed to show not what he can do with a Republican Congress but what he can’t do with one.
The impossibility of getting much done at present lends itself to expansiveness, at least at the level of presidential rhetoric. Talking about what he would like to do, rather than what he can do, Obama is able to offer a broad agenda around the themes of equality and fairness that framed his second inaugural. At the same time, the president must avoid the charge that he is relapsing into old-school liberalism. Thus he framed his proposals on Tuesday evening as “smarter government” rather than bigger or more government.
This framing is telling. Where Obama may be overreaching is in assuming away fiscal problems that are still very much with us. The American economy is in recovery mode and tax receipts are rising, but a vast structural deficit remains. Absent the kind of grand bargain Republicans are loath even to discuss, federal insolvency will pre-empt the kinds of investments Obama talked about last night. To the delight of his base, the president has found his progressive voice. Only in a context of fiscal rectitude can he use it to bring back government activism.
A slightly different version of the piece appears in the Financial Times.