For 20 months now, Beltway Dems have derided the bully pulpit of the Presidency. Let this be Exhibit A:

House Minority Leader John Boehner says he would vote for President Obama's plan to extend tax cuts only for middle-class earners, not the wealthy, if that were the only option available to House Republicans.

Boehner, R-Ohio, said it is "bad policy" to exclude the highest-earning Americans from tax relief during the recession, and later Sunday he accused the White House of "class warfare." But he said he wouldn't block the breaks for middle-income individuals and families if Democrats won't support the full package.

(Emphasis supplied.) Lessons learned about political bargaining one hopes.

Speaking for me only

HuffPo:

"If what it takes to prevent a tax hike is to start with two years, if that's what it takes to talk Democrats out of raising taxes, that would be a good start," said Don Stewart, [GOP Leader Sen. Mitch] McConnell's communications director. "But we're not for raising taxes in two years.The most important thing is to prevent a tax hike in the middle of a recession," Stewart added. "This should be done for as long as possible, but a 2-year freeze at the current rate, if that's what it takes to prevent a Democrat tax hike, would certainly be preferable to an immediate tax hike on every taxpaying American."

Cutting taxes for the wealthy as proposed by the Republicans would cost $700 billion over 10 years. See when deficits don't matter? When it involves tax cuts for the wealthy. Where's Pete Peterson on this?

Also, if Republicans want to cut taxes for 98% of Americans, they can support the Obama tax cuts for the middle class. They don't. They only care about tax cuts for the wealthy.

Speaking for me only

Peter Griffin: First, I will return Joe's pool. In exchange, I demand access to it on alternate weekends.

Joe: No.
Peter: Accepted. I also demand to remain my own independent nation.
Mayor Adam West: Absolutely not.
Peter: How about you just give me your pen?
Mayor Adam West: You mean this cheap little pen we have millions of back at the office?
Peter: Yeah.
Mayor Adam West: No - Family Guy Petoria episode

Jon Cohn on the Peter Orszag School of Bargaining:

Mark Schmitt, November 17, 2008:

The massive resistance Republicans posed to Clinton in 1993 is impossible to imagine today. The Republican coalition is utterly shattered, and the angry white Palin wing of the party, for all its visibility, is a minority even within a minority. [. . .] Obama, like other reconstructive leaders, will have to challenge some of the assumptions and institutions that come from the old era, just as FDR couldn't make lasting change until he had broken the Supreme Court's prevailing beliefs about the limits to government involvement in the economy. In one of the first articles about Obama's political career, from when he was first running for the Illinois Senate in 1995, he is quoted as telling the crowd that "it's time for politicians and other leaders to ... see voters, residents, or citizens as producers of change. ... What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them?"

Fast forward to September 7, 2010, Steve Benen complaining about the WaPo:

Wipeout:

Two months before the 2010 midterm elections, likely voters now favor the Republican over the Democratic candidate in their congressional district by 53-40 percent, the widest GOP margin on record in ABC News/Washington Post polls since 1981.

The economy is why.

Speaking for me only

Intemperate?

[T]he covert theocratic agenda of the [Beck] coalition needs to be emphatically pointed out to the American People at every possible moment[. . . .] The fundamental fact is that most Americans [. . .] don't want to live in a "Christian Nation" theocracy and they need to be shown that this is indeed the covert agenda of Beck and his ominously named "Black Robed Regiments."

An excerpt from Markos' "American Taliban"? No, that's Ed Kilgore of the Democratic Strategist. Will weenie liberals condemn this intemperate attack? (FTR, I think Beck's agenda is to make a lot of money.)

Speaking for me only

Obama's Former Budget Director:

In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether. Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high-income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it.

(Emphasis supplied.) It should not require giving the wealthy and corporations a tax cut in order to give the middle class a tax cut. Only the political incompetence of Democrats and their bureaucrats would make this so. It is at the heart of the political and policy failure of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress on the economy. Peter Orzag's first column for The New York Times illustrates why the Dems are poised to receive a crushing defeat in November. There are other flaws in Orzag's analysis:

In the October issue of Vanity Fair, a new expose on Sarah Palin.

The Guardian has the highlights in case you don't want to wade through it:

• She managed to spend $3,000 (of campaign funds) on underwear (including Spandex girdles). More on the shopping spree here.
• She calls on angels to protect her from demonic attacks
• She's a bad tipper
• Her Facebook and Twitter feeds may be ghost-written
• The McCain Campaign gave her books to increase her learning curve on issues
• She doesn't hunt

Sarah's response, according to the Guardian: [More...]

NYTimes:

The college vote is up for grabs this year — to an extent that would have seemed unlikely two years ago, when a generation of young people seemed to swoon over Barack Obama. Though many students are liberals on social issues, the economic reality of a weak job market has taken a toll on their loyalties: far fewer 18- to 29-year-olds now identify themselves as Democrats compared with 2008.

“Is the recession, which is hitting young people very hard, doing lasting or permanent damage to what looked like a good Democratic advantage with this age group?” asked Scott Keeter, the director of survey research at the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan group. “The jury is still out.”

It's still the economy, stupid.

Speaking for me only

Below I wrote about the Beltway (and White House?) narrative that Obama's failures are all the progressives' fault. That's why, as Atrios noted, Paul Krugman's points on the stimulus are critical:

The way the right [I would say the Beltway myself] wants to tell the story — and, I’m afraid, the way it will play in November — is that the Obama team went all out for Keynesian policies, and they failed. So back to supply-side economics! [. . . T]hat is not at all what happened. A straight Keynesian analysis implied the need for a much bigger program, more oriented toward spending, than the administration proposed. And people like me said that at the time — we’re not talking about hindsight.

[. . .] I’m trying to keep the record straight here. It may not matter for the immediate political debate, but I think it does matter for the long game.

There will be a predictable lynching of progressives by the Beltway after the coming crushing defeat for Dems in November, possibly led by the White House itself.

Speaking for me only

Kevin Drum on How To Learn To Stop Worrying and Whistle Past the GraveYard:

Parties rarely move to the center immediately after a big defeat. Usually it takes two or three before they finally get the message, and on that metric Republicans aren't due for a move to the center until sometime after 2012.

As for the tea parties, they're nothing new. We've seen similar conservative movements flower like clockwork during previous Democratic administrations, and they always burn themselves out after a few years. The tea party movement has ascended faster than its ancestors, partly because of lousy economic conditions and partly because of the power of modern media, and my guess is that their fall will be equally swift when it comes. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin simply aren't the kind of people who wear well. Their fifteen minutes aren't up yet, but they will be within a year or two.

(Emphasis supplied.) Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the Dems are on their way to a crushing defeat in November. Apparently, people like the current crop of Dems "did not wear well" and their fall looks like it will be swift. But at least our discourse is civil. They can't take that away from us.

Speaking for me only

McClatchy:

[A] small but growing number of moderate Democrats are balking at boosting taxes on the rich. [. . .] "The economy is very weak right now. Raising taxes will lower consumer demand at a time when we want people putting more money into the economy," said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., who isn't seeking re-election.

[. . .] Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., represents the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, one of the nation's wealthiest districts. [. . .] "Sometimes we forget how we became the majority. We did it by winning some affluent districts," he said.

Bayh, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Kent Conrad of North Dakota — have signaled that they won't back a permanent repeal of the tax cuts for the wealthy. [. . .]

(Emphasis supplied.) the article operates from an erroneous premise - that legislation is need to sunset the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Actually, doing nothing causes that to happen. However, to give a tax cut for working Americans, new legislation is necessary. So what Evan Bayh, Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson and Gerald Connolly are saying is that they will OPPOSE TAX CUTS FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS unless there are also tax cuts for the rich. Well, if that's what they want to do - OPPOSE TAX CUTS FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS, more power to them. But progressives and the President do not have to play along with them. Put it to a vote and let Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad and Gerald Connolly explain that they OPPOSED TAX CUTS FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS because their rich friends did not get a tax cut too.

Speaking for me only