Timothy P. Carney didn’t have a chance to see details of the proposed federal debt-limit deal before filing his latest Washington Examiner column, but he was able to glean that the deal would follow a pattern clear from President Obama’s previous dealings with Congress.
[T]his debt deal is similarly Machiavellian: Substance was subjugated to political framing. Republicans had their demands: no tax increases, yes spending cuts. Democrats’ demands had a different tone.
First, Democrats wanted to ensure this was the last debt-limit increase before the 2012 elections. Raising the debt limit, as Sen. Obama said in 2006, is “a sign of leadership failure” and politically unpopular.
Second, they wanted to ensure that the right issues would be debated in the election year. A high-stakes debate over a balanced budget amendment — as required by the bill the House passed on Friday — would make it clear that Democrats, unlike most Americans, do not want a balanced budget.
Instead, the “trigger” in the new compromise bill sets up a debate that Obama can easily cast as a fight between cutting Medicare and raising taxes on Big Oil, corporate jet owners and the richest 1 percent.
If raising taxes on these politically disfavored classes was really the Democrats’ priority, they could have done it already — either before the 2010 elections or by driving a harder bargain in the last three budget battles. But instead, their priority is debating these targeted tax increases and pretending they will save Medicare from insolvency.
Democrats’ willingness to compromise doesn’t reflect superior maturity to the more rigid Republicans. Quite the contrary: It reflects caring less about policy than about politics.
