What a Fool Believes

MSNBC's Chris Matthews has opined that President Obama has turned lemons into lemonade in this congressional lame-duck session by brokering a deal on extensions of the Bush tax cuts and improving his standing among moderates for his less ideological approach to getting thing done. Well, may I say a few words on the subject? While I respect my fellow member of the Philadelphia Irish brethren, Matthews is off the mark on this one.

True, Obama's poll numbers have improved since the "shellacking" the Democrats got in the midterm elections. Obama did get key policy initiatives through in this lame-duck session. This all misses the point. Though he's denied John Boehner and Mitch McConnell a good deal of political credit for the tax bill, the truth is that the Republicans still got most of what they wanted and gave up very little. They got tax cuts through extortion, refusing to extend unemployment benefits and middle-class tax breaks unless they got got tax breaks for the top two percent of Americans. They pretty much said to the President, Do what we say and nobody gets hurt. With tax cuts having been extended and a payroll tax holiday having been enacted, they have added to the deficit and given themselves an excuse to propose massive spending cuts to social programs that benefit a huge amount of people - like Social Security.

As for Obama getting his mojo back . . . well, the Republican House convening in January will be hostile to many of his proposals, and Speaker-designate John Boehner refuses to compromise. Mitch McConnell will block any such proposals in the Democratic Senate with even more votes at his disposal. While I am happy to see the Don't Ask, Don't Tell (or DADT, which sounds like a recording studio acronym) policy repealed and the act of allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military, bear in mind that the bill that would have allowed foreign-born minors to get an education and serve in the military to earn citizenship (the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, yet another one of those long-winded names for legislation, with dumbed-down acronyms) did not pass. Further action in the 112th Congress on that issue is unlikely. And, as I have preciously noted on this blog, the Republicans will have the clout and the numbers (not to mention the money) in their favor going into the 2012 congressional elections; Obama may still win a second term, but his party will most likely be reduced to oppositional status - at best - in 2013.

Not only is it foolish to think Obama has added strength going into 2011, it's equally foolish for his liberal base to think that momentum is on their side just because Republicans have looked churlish and a few progressive "wish list" proposals became policy. They're still flailing for relevance in a center-right political atmosphere at a time when their role in the debate has been diminished by their own apathy and media indifference. Liberals have used poll numbers on individual issues to prove that the public actually agrees with them more, and majority support for letting taxes go up on the rich and growing support for the health care law back up that claim. But they still have to make their case in an environment where they have difficulty being heard.

Two cases in point: New Jersey governor Chris Christie insisted that there's no money to meet pension obligations in his state on CBS's "60 Minutes," but when Steve Kroft interviewed him, he failed to ask Christie about his tax break for upper-income New Jersey residents, as Ed Schultz pointed out. Meanwhile, the media have been looking back on a year that saw a Glenn Beck conservative rally on the Washington Mall in August, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's "Restore Sanity and/or Fear" rally parody on the Mall at the end of October, as well as a serious liberal rally - One Nation Working Together - held on the Mall early in October. When mainstream media outlets mention any of these rallies in retrospect, one rally doesn't get mentioned. Guess which rally.

(The PBS NewsHour didn't even report on the One Nation Working Together rally when it happened.)