Over the past few days, there has been a giant pile of negative vibes floating around. Between the passing of Elizabeth Edwards from cancer, the 30th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, the fire which recently consumed the home of one of my neighbors, and the general stress and psychosis that are beginning to creep into my days as I rush to complete my holiday preparations, I've been fighting a bit harder than usual to keep my sunny side up.
And yet, with all this to think about, the one thing my mind keeps chewing on more than anything else is the god-awful "compromise" that has been struck between the White House and the GOP over the Bush tax cuts. It has saddened and infuriated me in ways I can't fully articulate. I am trying to tell myself that it's not what I should be focused on, especially at this time when there is so much else going on that requires my immediate attention. But I just can't help it.
The thing is, I have really worked hard to back this president up. Many people have. He was someone that I thought would be driven to make good on the promises he made while campaigning. Not that he'd necessarily deliver on all of them; that would be impossible and even I, on my most optimistic days, know that. But I expected, from his words and the force with which he delivered them on the campaign trail, that he'd be driven to at least try and tackle the issues once he'd been elected, and that even when he inevitably lost a political battle here and there, he'd go down swinging.
I had seen that maddeningly cool and reasonable side of him on the campaign trail, too. I knew he could go full-on Vulcan once in a while, and that it often happened when you most wanted him to be fired up and fire other people up. So I don't suppose I have any right to be shocked when that Spock-like demeanor appears and undermines the passionate side of his personality. Weighing all the information is a good thing, and I appreciate the fact that the president can do this - and values doing this - when making his decisions.
But here's where I get angry. This was not a decision that had to be made at the last minute. Someone who values information as much as President Obama does should have known that. We all own calendars. We all knew the issue of Bush's tax cuts would need to be resolved before the end of this year, and we all knew that the issue of extending unemployment benefits would also need to be dealt with in the same time frame. When the Republicans blocked those benefits from being extended before the compromise (not once, but multiple times), why was this not made into a huge public issue by the White House? Why were we not told by our president at the time, in no uncertain terms, that this action was indefensible, and that the people needed to communicate with their elected officials to get them to do the right thing? He could have made a bigger deal about this, and he should have. This would have forced the unemployment benefits issue to stand alone, as an example of GOP stubbornness hurting the American people, and it would have forced the Congress to deal with it as it stood and not as part of a tax cut package.
Granted, there are many other important situations that have been fighting for attention in D.C. But if the well-being of the unemployed was as much of a heartfelt concern for the president as he's been saying it is (nonstop, for the last 24 hours, as a justification for why he "had" to compromise with the GOP), then he would have moved it up a bit on his agenda. He would have made sure there was a plan in place well before now, when the sense of urgency about extending those benefits wasn't a carrot the Republicans could dangle to get the White House to jump through its hoops. President Obama said, at his press conference yesterday, that it only makes sense to negotiate with hostage-takers if "the hostage gets harmed". Well, on whose watch did the American people get taken hostage by the GOP, Mr. President? How did they become pawns in this discussion, and why could that not have been prevented somehow?
The art of political negotiating in Washington is, no doubt, a highly complex and inscrutable process. I don't suppose I have the expertise needed to truly judge how skilled or how unskilled a person is at making good deals on Capitol Hill. I just have a gut feeling that President Obama didn't do all he could to advance his cause, and that he left the discussion too late to operate from a place of strength. Yes, he may have wanted to spare the unemployed any problems that they might face should their benefits run out, but the fact that he was in that position - standing with a political gun to his head by the GOP, forced to give up a principle that formed a major cornerstone of his campaign just to get something so basic and so necessary - tells me that this president is not as capable of effective legislative leadership as his supporters expected him to be.
I've already heard what the president thinks of my opinion, and the opinions of others who feel he failed by making this compromise. He's been very clear about the idea that those of us who disagree with him simply don't know what a great deal this actually was, and how satisfied we should all be to have it, under the circumstances.
Those circumstances, however, are the problem, and they are a problem of the president's own making. God help me for saying this, but there are a few times when he should be "the decider", as George W. Bush so memorably put it. Obama based his whole campaign on change. Changing the way Washington worked, changing the way things got done, changing the whole scene. And yet, here he is, explaining away this deal he's made by telling his base that it's not so bad, considering the way things are. That he is expecting us to be OK with him working within the constraints of "the way things are", after all his words about change during his campaign, is truly distressing.
I know the president has a big mess to clean up. I know he's not getting all the help and support he needs, either from Washington or from those of us outside of Washington. I don't expect everything to be peachy keen only 2 years after we ended the 8 years of Bush's crazy train presidency. But I am not being unreasonable or out of line when I say that this compromise should not have happened as it did, and that there must have been other, and probably better, ways in which to handle this.
I am not a member of what is known by the White House as "the professional left". No one has ever paid me a dime to think the way I think, or believe what I believe. My opinions are not dictated to me by anyone in the media. I am simply an informed and interested citizen who takes seriously my rights and responsibilities as a part of America's democracy. And I consider it both my right and my responsibility to speak out when I feel something is wrong. I support President Obama, and I have for a long time. That does not mean I agree with all he does, nor does it mean I should just shut up and act grateful no matter what he does. And when something as infuriating as this compromise happens, I don't have any qualms about expressing my anger.
None of us who helped the president get elected did it half-heartedly. Nobody gave up hours of their time working phone banks or chunks of their money donating to his campaign on a whim. It was out of commitment to him, and to the principles he claimed to represent. Even when it was inconvenient, even when it was difficult, even when it cut into our free time or our disposable income, we did not stop. We never compromised a damn thing when we worked so hard to help him. We didn't expect him to compromise so freely on something so important. If he continues to sell out on what he promised us he'd do, and if he continues to play the victim when we express our unhappiness with such decisions, he will find that his army of support from 2008 has largely dried up by 2012. And if the Democratic base is even less enthusiastic about their party in 2012 than they were for this year's midterm elections, we are all in big, big trouble.
Deal or no deal
