Hullabaloo

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

 
Centrist Democrats refuse to cash in on the GOP's biggest weakness

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent, in addition to generally knowing what's going on around Washington better than most pundits, also has a way of distilling what many of us already know into easily digestible conclusions. Today he makes the excellent point that while the public generally wants to curb deficits, they don't agree with Republicans on how to do that:

Republicans know they can’t abandon the Ryan fiscal vision because the right won’t let them — and because they just don’t want to — and they also know that they can’t talk about its specifics, either. Instead, they must stress only the general goal of balancing the budget, and on savaging Dems for not being willing to balance it.

What this gets back to is a basic truism about American politics, one that favors Republicans in some ways, and not in others: The public favors the idea of getting government spending under control in the abstract — hence the support for “balancing the budget” — but broadly disagrees with Republicans on the specifics of how to accomplish this. The new “balanced budget” strategy is explicitly designed to get around this problem by emphasizing the general idea of spending cuts rather than the Ryan plan’s specifics. But there is no willingness to rethink the party’s basic priorities to deal with it.

The political fault lines in the traditional press tend to be drawn between Democrats who want to maintain social programs at the expense of deficit spending, and Republicans who want to slash deficits at the expense of the social programs. This, of course, is far from the truth. There are plenty of Democrats who are obsessed with curbing deficits even if it means cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The President is among them.

Regular readers of this blog know that neither Digby nor I believe that deficits are actually that big a problem. But what if Democrats didn't have to make a choice between appearing insouciant about deficits and maintaining social programs?

As it turns out, of course, we don't. The Budget for All (formerly the People's Budget) balances the budget while doing what poll after poll shows the public really wants: improving social spending while making corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share again.

If the conversation stops being about who wants to balance the budget and who doesn't--or worse, just what proportion of Social Security and Medicare cuts will be "needed" to curb the deficit--and starts being just about the way we get there, Republicans will be in even bigger trouble than they already are.

All it would take is enough Democrats willing to buck against corporate contributors and the wealthy parents their kids go to school with.

That shouldn't be all that hard. Money talks in politics, but not loudly enough to drown the awful, unpopular noise of the Ryan budget.


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thereisnospoon 3/19/2013 03:27:00 PM