A Good Man Forced By Tragic Circumstance To Do Bad Things
As I wrote back in April when progressive pundits in D.C. were so deeply baffled by Obama’s supposed “tactical mistake” in not insisting on a clean debt ceiling increase, Obama’s so-called “bad negotiating” or “weakness” is actually “shrewd negotiation” because he’s getting what he actually wants (which, shockingly, is not always the same as what he publicly says he wants). In this case, what he wants — and has long wanted, as he’s said repeatedly in public — are drastic spending cuts. In other words, he’s willing — eager — to impose the “pain” Cohn describes on those who can least afford to bear it so that he can run for re-election as a compromise-brokering, trans-partisan deficit cutter willing to “take considerable heat from his own party.”
Written by gerrycanavan
August 1, 2011 at 9:43 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Barack Obama, debt ceiling, Glenn Greenwald, politics, ugh
2 Responses
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I think we would just like to believe in a man who was naively maneuvered into this terrible deal than a man who himself maneuvered the country into it — for what seems almost certainly like very flawed re-election strategy at the expense of the nation.
Fred
August 1, 2011 at 10:21 am
whyyyy does it take so long for every professional commentator except greenwald to internalize these observations?
Vu
August 1, 2011 at 12:25 pm