You know me. If anyone is going to find the Obama apologist argument in the room, it's going to be me. I wear my designation as an O-apologist with pride-or as Quayle once put it I wear their scorn like a badge of honor. More than anything I don't join in when other milk sops start piling on the President.
I can't deny, though that I'm, well, let's say I'm quite "troubled" by this one. It's hard to deny the argument that both Obama and the Dems have missed the whole point of how to win this fight. You can talk about the asymmetry between those that regularly take plane trips and all those others who don't but count on things like Meals on Wheels and Headstart. The relatively welloff passengers have their inconvenience quickly ended. What's just as appalling is the strategic blunder, the lost opportunity.
It is shocking: who knew Congress is even capable of moving this fast?
"It's perplexing that we're saving programs that are inconveniencing others, but we're not saving programs that are saving lives," said Ellie Hollander, president and CEO of Meals on Wheels, which estimates that, because of sequestration, seniors will be getting 19 million fewer meals."
I can't deny, though that I'm, well, let's say I'm quite "troubled" by this one. It's hard to deny the argument that both Obama and the Dems have missed the whole point of how to win this fight. You can talk about the asymmetry between those that regularly take plane trips and all those others who don't but count on things like Meals on Wheels and Headstart. The relatively welloff passengers have their inconvenience quickly ended. What's just as appalling is the strategic blunder, the lost opportunity.
It is shocking: who knew Congress is even capable of moving this fast?
"It's perplexing that we're saving programs that are inconveniencing others, but we're not saving programs that are saving lives," said Ellie Hollander, president and CEO of Meals on Wheels, which estimates that, because of sequestration, seniors will be getting 19 million fewer meals."
"The bewilderment was prompted by votes Thursday night and Friday morning that granted the Department of Transportation more budget flexibility to deal with the furloughs of 47,000 Federal Aviation Administration employees, including 15,000 flight controllers. Those furloughs had started to take place on Monday. But a swift outcry from consumers forced to endure flight delays, along with attacks from Republicans who placed the blame at the feet of the president, resulted in swift action from lawmakers just before they flew home for recess."
"The ability of Congress to move with haste amazed those organizations and advocates who have spent months -- and in some cases, years -- lobbying lawmakers to come to an agreement on a sequestration fix. Cuts affecting their programs and priorities have also taken a toll, often with more severe consequences than tarmac delays. So far, however, their influence peddling has amounted to very little."
"The short version is that late last night it took a break from its regular schedule of lacking 60 votes to shampoo the chamber carpet and unanimously passed a bill that will provide the FAA unique flexibility under sequestration — and thus halt the furloughs that have been causing travel delays around the country. Today the House will follow suit, and the White House has made it clear President Obama intends to sign it. Great if you fly. Bad, bad news if you’re on head start or rely on meals on wheels or otherwise aren’t a Priority Pass holder."
It's hard not to think that the Dems have wholly missed the point of what they're trying to achieve:
"The sequester is really obvious when you are standing in line at an airport," explained Sue Nelson, vice president of federal advocacy at the American Heart Association. "I was waiting in line myself. People that you think never heard the word 'sequester' were using it in line. The problem with the National Institute of Health is, you are not going to die tomorrow because of a sequester cut. What it will mean is some cure for heart failure or a disease that could have been available in your lifetime may now not be."
Exactly, it's really obvious. That's what the Dems should want. How else is everyone going to call their Congressman and demand that the sequester comes to an end? If you take away all obvious, visible signs of it, then the GOP wins.
"While several groups were critical of what they perceived to be special treatment for inconvenienced airline travelers, others were worried that Congress' quick fix would undermine a broader political strategy to get the sequester replaced in full. The Obama administration's plan to resolve the sequestration standoff, after all, was for the pain of those cuts to be felt so widely that it would prompt lawmakers to come together on a replacement package."
"Aside the obvious iniquity, this is a big error."
"The point of sequestration is supposedly to create just enough chaos that regular people — people with political clout, such as, say, business travelers — demand that Congress fix it. Or as the Democrats conceived it, to create the public pressure they need to knock Republicans off their absolutist position on taxes."
"Well, they got their outcry…and then promptly folded. They allowed Republicans to inaccurately characterize the FAA furloughs as a political stunt. Then without any organized effort to cast the flight delays as part of the same problem that’s also keeping poor people homeless they assented to providing special treatment to the traveling class."
It's hard to argue with Ezra Klein:
"The Democrats have lost on sequestration."
"That’s the simple reality of Friday’s vote to ease the pain for the Federal Aviation Administration. By assenting to it, Democrats have agreed to sequestration for the foreseeable future."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/26/the-democrats-have-lost-on-sequestration/
I want to believe that this is somehow not the major boner it looks like. I can;t think of how that could be right now. The best I can come up with is Jonathan Chait's take, Yes it was a terrible, unforced error:
"Republicans spent the last few weeks mocking sequestration as a giant nothing-burger that nobody except Spendocrats cares about. But Republicans — and Democrats, too — suddenly recoiled in horror when the Federal Aviation Administration had to furlough some air traffic controllers. Faced with cutbacks that inconvenienced air travels, and not poor people or shmoes like that, Congress raced into action to reverse the cuts at lightning speed."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/democrats-lost-sequestration-two-years-ago.html
However:
However:
"Brian Beutler, Noam Scheiber, and Ezra Klein are despondent — especially the latter, who leads, “The Democrats have lost on sequestration.” That seems a tad melodramatic. I wouldn’t say the Democrats have lost; I’d say they are losing. The current dynamic is that Republicans can reverse the cuts they don’t like, but refuse to reverse the cuts Democrats don’t like. If that continues perpetually, Democrats will lose. I wouldn’t automatically assume the same thing will keep happening. Sometimes, things change."
That's the best I can come up with as well. It was a bad mistake but maybe they realize that now or will at some point and not do it again. It is possible that Obama is playing 11 dimensional chess again: I say that deliberately for the firebaggers.
In all seriousness, maybe it's not as bad as it looks. How could that be? Well, remember the debt ceiling fight early this year? Everyone said that the President was tying his own hands by refusing to even rhetorically consider the platinum coin or the constitutional option. It turned out he was right-they didn't need it and it would have been counterproductive by letting the GOP off the hook. Maybe he and his staff have a good reason to do this and it won't hurt their position. Maybe. It's hard to see it right now, though. It's hard to see how they can win if they lack the stamina for short term pain. After all, that's the only way they can for the GOP back to the negotiating table.
"The putative concern seems to be that the White House didn’t want to be seen standing in the way of a solution — and in particular a Republican solution — to the furlough problem in order to tie these airline delays to a larger budget fight. Nor did they want to face a situation where Congress eventually dealt President Obama a defeat by passing FAA flexibility legislation with veto-proof majorities."
"But that’s another way of admitting that the Republicans have more stamina in this fight than Democrats do. And it sets a precedent that sequestration’s problems — particularly those that impact the wealthy — can be fixed piecemeal by shimmying money around, instead of by raising revenue to restore finances to important government programs."
"It is worth noting how different the Democrats’ approach to sequestration has been to the GOP’s approach to, well, everything. Over the past five years, Republicans have repeatedly accepted short-term political pain to win the leverage necessary for long-term policy gain. That’s the governing political principle behind their threats to shut down the government, breach the debt ceiling, and, for that matter, accept sequestration. Today, Democrats showed they’re not willing to accept even a bit of short-term pain for leverage on sequestration. They played a game of chicken with the Republicans, and they lost. Badly."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/26/the-democrats-have-lost-on-sequestration/
The one retort I have here is that for all that the GOP has had very few victories over 5 years. What have they won? They "defeated" background checks-I use quotes as they actually passed by 10 votes but the Senate is now a dysfunctional body controlled by the minority thanks to the 60 vote supermajority requirement. Yet, this is probably a case of winning a battle and losing the war-this will really fuel a groundswell going forward. At most they delayed something that will prove inevitable.
Still, it's hard to disagree with Chait here:
"Obama’s mistake wasn’t the design of sequestration. It was finding himself in that negotiation to begin with. Earlier this year, Obama refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling, and Republicans caved and raised it. If he had done that in 2011, they would probably have done the same thing. Instead, Obama took their demand to reduce the deficit at face value and thought, Hey, I want to reduce the deficit, too — why don’t we use this opportunity to strike a deal? As it happened, Republicans care way, way, way more about low taxes for the rich than low deficits, which made a morally acceptable deal, or even something within hailing distance of a morally acceptable deal, completely impossible.
"By the point at which Obama figured this out in 2011, the debt ceiling loomed and it was too late to credibly insist he wouldn’t negotiate over it. Sequestration was a pretty good way to escape fiscal calamity. The mistake was getting jacked up over the debt ceiling in the first place."
In 2011 though, the GOP had a little more political capital and the President considerably less so he may have had to negotiate.
Overall, though the point is well taken: Obama was right not to negotiate this year and it's hard to argue that he-or the Democrats- should have agreed to this. However, time will tell and I'd like to be proved wrong. And even if they made a mistake, as Chait points out maybe they'll realize their blunder and do better next time.
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