Obama: Stupid or Decietful, Not Sure There are Other Options

By Fuzzyone

I don't really have much to add to what Kevin Drum has to say. I've blogged before about what a mistake it was to adopt the Republican framing on debt and what a lousy negotiator Obama is. I think at this point it is hard to believe, as Drum says, that Obama and his team did not see what was coming when they did not force a debt ceiling increase in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Indeed, Obama got pathetically little in exchange for that extension and the sweetheart deal for the rich on the estate tax. Assuming Obama and his team are not that stupid the only alternative is that they have drunk the deficit reduction Kool-aid and they want these cuts but need the Republicans to be the ones pushing them since the people who elected him don't support them.

What Drum does not say is what progressives can do about this. The answer may well be not much. Obama is looking to the rich to finance his campaign and presumably thinks we will all vote for him since we have nowhere else to go. This may well be true. I'm not likely to either sit home or vote for a Republican on election day. The one thing we can do is support true progressives in the both state and federal government and hope they can pressure the President to do the right thing. One step in the right direction was the call by big city mayors for Obama to end the wars and spend that money on helping people at home. It now appears that Obama is poised to draw at least some troops down in Afghanistan so hopefully with some progressive pressure some of that money can be used here at home.