In Unity There is Strength
Source: Crooks and Liars
News reports from a variety of places -- and my own personal report-backs from participants at yesterday’s progressive organization leaders meeting at the White House -- indicate that the President is signaling loudly that he will stand strong on at least some of the very highest priority things that progressives care the most about in the fiscal showdown talks.
He continues to demand that the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000 go up; he said yesterday in the progressives meeting that Social Security was “off the table”; and he said that while he believes there can be Medicare and Medicaid savings from a variety of administrative methods, that he had no intention of cutting benefits. We don’t know how all of this is going to end up, but right now at least, the President has decided that in unity there is strength.
This doesn't come as a big surprise to me. In a conversation a couple of months back with a senior White House official, we were talking about the fiscal showdown politics, and I was emphasizing that there would be a serious civil war in the Democratic Party if Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were cut -- that our side wasn't going to back down on this fight. His response was that the Obama team had learned from the past that the administration was in a far stronger position if they were unified with progressives, that they felt that was when they had gotten things done and had been in stronger political shape than when they had tried to triangulate things.
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