The liberal honeymoon with President Obama, predictably, did not last. Obama began his second term by tacking hard to the left, forcing Republicans to accept a tax increase on the rich and demanding stiff gun control reforms, but he's quietly changed strategies over the last two months.
Since his State of the Union Address, he's gone from denouncing House Republicans from the pulpit to schmoozing with them over dinner. And now he's proposed a budget that embraces some of the entitlement cuts that form the centerpiece of the Republican economic platform but are reviled by his fellow Democrats.
Obama now finds himself in a familiar position: stuck between a Democratic Party accusing him of base treachery and a Republican Party dismissing his overture and demanding much deeper concessions. It is not a position that yielded compelling results during his first term. In fact, one could argue that it was precisely Obama's willingness to give into Republicans' demands for spending cuts that led to the disastrous 2011 debt ceiling deal, which in turn cratered Obama's approval ratings, imperiled his re-election bid, and weakened an already-weak recovery.
One could argue it. One would be shortsighted to do so. Democrats who believed Obama could ride a wave of re-election enthusiasm into a new era of big-government liberalism were, frankly, delusional. Obama certainly gained new political capital when he defeated Mitt Romney, but political capital is quickly exhausted. Obama exhausted most of his before his second term even began just to raise marginal tax rates on income above $400,000 and avert the "fiscal cliff." After that, Republicans were done giving into tax increases in exchange for nothing.
And they can get away with being done with it. When the government failed to avert the March 1 sequester, both Congress and Obama saw drops in their approval ratings ? suggesting that Obama can no longer try to strong-arm Congress into submission without suffering politically from the resulting gridlock. Most House Republicans, however, cannot get away with giving Obama what would feel to them like another free pass. Any Republicans who approved the tax increases in Obama's budget without extracting any significant concessions probably wouldn't survive a primary next year.
Is that in and of itself a reason for Obama to give in to his opponents and make cuts to Medicare and Social Security? Absolutely not. So it's worth asking what Obama's long game is here. His rhetoric suggests that his end goal is to strike a grand bargain on the debt. That's just rhetoric, though. Obama, like most reasonable lawmakers, understands that the debt is not the albatross the Paul Ryans of the world take it for and that an obsession with deficit reduction amid such a fragile economic climate is misplaced.
What Obama needs is political capital. And to get that, he needs a bipartisan achievement, any bipartisan achievement. He also needs the debt issue to recede. Just as Republicans declared the income-tax question resolved after the fiscal cliff deal, Obama can put a period on the matter of entitlement cuts. He could say, "I made them, I'm not making more of them, and it's time to focus on something other than the debt."
Is it unfair to service the president's agenda on the backs of the elderly and the infirm? Yes, grossly. There's no getting around it. That injustice, however, should be balanced against what Obama could accomplish with the momentum he'd gain from a large-scale debt deal. If he can use that momentum to push through comprehensive immigration reform or, even more importantly, significant gun control measures, conceding ground on entitlements will be worth it.
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Craig Frucht is a senior majoring in psychology and political science. He can be reached at Craig.Frucht@tufts.edu.
