The election gave the
President some leverage. Can he be creative with it?
We have a new year and, apparently, a new Barack Obama. This year's model doesn't mess around. He is tough, resolute, unbending. He forces the Republicans to raise taxes for the first time in 22 years. He says he won't negotiate with the Republicans over their next manufactured crisis, the debt ceiling. He nominates former Senator Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, despite the objections of noisy neoconservatives and the quietly powerful Israel lobby. He seems ready to make aggressive proposals on immigration and gun control.
We have a new year and, apparently, a new Barack Obama. This year's model doesn't mess around. He is tough, resolute, unbending. He forces the Republicans to raise taxes for the first time in 22 years. He says he won't negotiate with the Republicans over their next manufactured crisis, the debt ceiling. He nominates former Senator Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, despite the objections of noisy neoconservatives and the quietly powerful Israel lobby. He seems ready to make aggressive proposals on immigration and gun control.
These are all positive steps.
The President has decided that
he is, for the moment, in a position of power and, unlike his first-term
negotiating style, seems ready to bulldoze his hapless opponents. This has
given rise to a fair amount of wailing and teeth-gnashing among Republicans,
who've suddenly recognized that they're on the wrong side of demography--but
don't seem to realize yet that the public is entirely sick of gimmicks like the
debt-ceiling apocalypse. In this, they match the inept Democrats of the 1980s,
who were convinced that the election of Ronald Reagan presaged the onset of
American fascism. I'll never forget Congressman Dick Gephardt's response to
Reagan's "Morning in America" campaign theme: "It's ... midnight
and it's getting darker all the time."
It's never midnight in
America, but there is too much black humor passing for public policy these
days. The darkness was neon in the farcical but sort of serious suggestion,
supported by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, among others, that the President mint
a $1 trillion platinum coin and place it in the Treasury, thus eliminating the
need to raise the debt ceiling. Krugman said this was "silly but
benign," as opposed to the Republicans' silly but noxious efforts to hold
the nation's economy hostage by raising the prospect of a U.S. default on
outstanding loans. The operative word was silly.
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Illustration by Oliver Munday for Time |
And here I must say a few
words about the Democrats. Unlike the Republicans, they live in a recognizable
version of America. They do not deny climate change, or evolution, or see urban
areas as a foreign country; over the past 30 years, they've been far better at
fiscal discipline than Republicans have. But there is a smugness and lassitude
to the party right now, an absence of creative new policy thinking, a tendency
to defend corroded industrial-age welfare and entitlement programs. They even
blocked a modest money-saving change in Social Security's cost-of-living index.
And this is where the real challenge of Obama's second term will lie.
"We'll probably only begin
to have a serious discussion of health care policy," says Oklahoma's
Republican Senator Tom Coburn, "when the costs of doing nothing outweigh
the costs of taking action." Coburn has been a profile in courage on
long-term deficit issues. He was a member of the Simpson-Bowles commission and
was that rare Republican who favored higher revenues long before we reached the
fiscal cliff. Talk to Coburn, a practicing physician, for 15 minutes and you'll
hear six good ideas about how to make health care better, not just cheaper. But
he doesn't sound very optimistic about the chances of having that sort of
conversation in Washington right now. He can count on one hand the number of
Democrats willing to take the same sort of risks on entitlement spending that
he took on revenues.
Coburn was close to Obama when
they were both Senators. Not so much lately--a lacuna I'll lay on the President,
who seems as antisocial when it comes to politicians postelection as he was
before. (Indeed, the President should invite the Senate's entire Gang of Six
over for an informal dinner and conversation about long-term thinking.) Coburn
believes that it's not too late for Obama to lead. "He could lay out three
specific goals he wants to achieve when it comes to Medicare reform," the
Senator says, "and work with us to get there."
But more is needed than that.
What we really need right now
is the exact opposite of the flagrantly witless conversation we've been having.
We need a real plan to renovate the creaky welfare, regulatory, revenue and
infrastructure components of our government. This does not simply mean a
green-eyeshade look at how best to cut entitlements. It means a substantive
move to make health care better, as well as less expensive. It means a renewed
discussion of citizenship--whether people who get benefits, like food stamps or
Pell Grants, from the government owe us some community service in return. It
means a revised tax code with lower rates, fewer loopholes and higher taxes on
polluters.
Action on any of these issues
is unlikely, but the conversation needs to start--and I'm hoping for a return
of the early, visionary Obama to get it going in his second Inaugural Address.
Joe Klein, TIME,
January 21, 2013
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