Medicare Eyed

President Obama's job speech (text here), Robert Kuttner notes, "was the right narrative and the right tone." It was a very good speech with a period of rhetorical flair which could have come from a Democrat. Sounding every bit the community organizer, Obama at approximately the two-thirds mark explained

But what we can't do - what I won't do - is let this economic crisis be used as an excuse to wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. I reject the idea that we need to ask people to choose between their jobs and their safety. I reject the argument that says for the economy to grow, we have to roll back protections that ban hidden fees by credit card companies, or rules that keep our kids from being exposed to mercury, or laws that prevent the health insurance industry from shortchanging patients. I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy. We shouldn't be in a race to the bottom, where we try to offer the cheapest labor and the worst pollution standards. America should be in a race to the top. And I believe that's a race we can win.

In fact, this larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone's money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they're on their own - that's not who we are. That's not the story of America.

Yes, we are rugged individualists. Yes, we are strong and self-reliant. And it has been the drive and initiative of our workers and entrepreneurs that has made this economy the engine and envy of the world.

But there has always been another thread running throughout our history - a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future - a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges. And leaders of both parties have followed the example he set.

Ask yourselves - where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways and our bridges; our dams and our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the GI Bill. Where would we be if they hadn't had that chance?

How many jobs would it have cost us if past Congresses decided not to support the basic research that led to the Internet and the computer chip? What kind of country would this be if this Chamber had voted down Social Security or Medicare just because it violated some rigid idea about what government could or could not do? How many Americans would have suffered as a result?

But only a broad outline of the details of the President's program was given and, some say, "God is in the details." "Small businesses," the President stated, "will get a tax cut if they hire new workers or raise workers' wages." Whether the businesses will be eligible for a cut if workers are laid off and then rehired, or wages are increased while benefits are cut, was left unclarified.

Similarly, the President urged Congress to cut payroll taxes further and to extend the reduction to employers. It is not clear whether the resulting shortfall in Social Security revenues would be completely made up by a transfer of funds from the general budget. If so, Obama's idea is a good one, given that the payroll tax takes proportionately more from the working and middle class than from the wealthy, a decrease thus allowing taxpayers to keep more of their paycheck and stimulating the economy more than would an income tax.

The President also wants to stabilize the housing market, extend unemployment insurance a year, improve the nation's infrastructure, and send aid which would allow municipalities to rehire teachers. Hopefully, priority would be given to public, rather than charter, school teachers. Given, however, that 17,000 net public sector jobs- a huge chunk of them those of teachers- vanished last month, the funding is critical.

The greatest of all unanswered questions proceeds from President Obama's assertion "And everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything."

A few taxes are coming down, spending for job creation going up- and "everything in this bill will be paid for?" While there is understandable pleasure that $450 billion- probably $200 billion this year, according to Kuttner- is being directed to job creation, the origin of the money is somewhat unclear.

Not completely, however. Obama gave us a hint as to whose ox will be gored in the interests of satisfying deficit maniacs:

.... it's a balanced plan that would reduce the deficit by making additional spending cuts; by making modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid; and by reforming our tax code in a way that asks the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share. What's more, the spending cuts wouldn't happen so abruptly that they'd be a drag on our economy, or prevent us from helping small business and middle-class families get back on their feet right away.

Now, I realize there are some in my party who don't think we should make any changes at all to Medicare and Medicaid, and I understand their concerns. But here's the truth. Millions of Americans rely on Medicare in their retirement. And millions more will do so in the future. They pay for this benefit during their working years. They earn it. But with an aging population and rising health care costs, we are spending too fast to sustain the program.

There are two components there: "reforming our tax code" which, to the party controlling Congress (if not the Executive Branch also) means reducing taxes for the wealthy and corporations; and "modest adjustments" to Medicare and Medicaid. Want to guess whether it's a) corporate America or b) elderly and/or poor Americans who will pay? Hint: The GOP controls the House. President Obama acquiesces to the GOP. Congressional Democrats acquiesce to Obama.

While he was giving yet another stirring speech, it might have behooved the President to explain that growing Medicare costs are not due to anything intrinsic to that program but simply-completely- to growing health care costs. Perhaps he might not have referred to a desire "to strengthen" what is a popular, effective, and strong, program. Instead, we have to destroy the village in order to save it:

And if we don't gradually reform the system while protecting current beneficiaries, it won't be there when future retirees need it. We have to reform Medicare to strengthen it.

Remember in a far-off galaxy when Democrats were exultant that House Republicans enthusiastically voted for a budget plan that would eliminate Medicare? The GOP handed its congressional opponents a campaign issue extraordinary in its generosity. Then Barack Obama put Medicare and Social Security "on the table" in debt ceiling negotiations, which

upset congressional Democrats, who saw a proposal from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to radically cut Medicare as an attack ad opening going into the Nov. 2012 elections. House Republicans voted for the Ryan proposal en masse, just months after hordes of GOP freshmen were swept into office amid advertisements vowing to protect the hugely popular entitlement program.

Democrats won an unexpected special election in New York earlier this year by attacking the Republican candidate, Jane Corwin, as an enemy of Medicare, based on her views on the Ryan budget plan.

President Obama has decided, apparently, that this is completely unacceptable.

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Social Security, Not Compromised


Could the White House finally be learning? Not likely but (CLICHE ALERT) hope springs eternal.

The Wall Street Journal reported on February 11

The White House last month considered offering specific benefit cuts and tax increases to shore up Social Security's finances, but ultimately decided to back off.

Officials weighed suggesting that Congress raise the ceiling on wages subject to the Social Security payroll tax and allow benefits to rise more slowly than under current law, according to three people familiar with the deliberations. The hope was to engage Republicans in talks.

But aides decided against putting forward the ideas, sure to be unpopular, without a clear signal from Republicans that they were ready to talk. As a result, the budget President Barack Obama will release Monday won't include any specific proposals to alter Social Security.

A proposal to raise the ceiling on wages subject to the Social Security payroll tax would be interpreted, accurately or otherwise, as a tax increase and thus be dead on arrival (another cliche) in a House controlled by Republicans. (It is, after all, a a party which cut taxes when fighting two wars it approved of. And put much of the cost off-budget.) Then it would support benefits to rise more slowly than at present, and blame the cut in benefits on Democrats wanting to (another cliche) pull the plug on Granny.

Of course, cutting benefits isn't necessary, anyway. Blogging on Ezra Klein's site in late June, Dylan Matthews explains that Janemarie Mulvey and Debra Whitman of the Congressional Research Service (report, in PDF, here)

looked at this question in 2008 by evaluating three different proposals. The first would raise the cap so that 90 percent of wages are taxed (CRS estimates this would mean a cap of $171,600 in 2006) and pay higher benefits to those affected; the second would eliminate the cap and pay higher benefits; and the third would eliminate the cap for taxes but would not increase benefits.

Matthews presents two graphs: the first, illustrating the impact of the proposals on the acuarial state of Social Security compared to the current course; the second, illustrating how much of the shortfall is eliminated by each proposal.










































While all proposals, Matthews notes, "put a dent in the shortfall, completely eliminating the cap without increasing benefits actually creates a long-term surplus, and eliminating the cap while increasing benefits comes close."

Economist Robert Kuttner of Demos notes (report here, in PDF)

The shortfall in the accounts began appeared in the early 1980s because the 1970s turned out to be a dismal decade for wages, as well as a period of high inflation....

When the economy went back into recovery, wages never resumed their previous link to productivity growth. Only in the middle and late 1990s, when we experienced near-full employment did wage growth return to something close to its previous trend—and during that period Social Security’s projected finances improved dramatically. The simplest and most reliable cure for the modest short fall in the Social Security accounts would be to restore the historic link between the economy’s productivity growth and median wage growth.

We don't know, obviously, whether the link between increased productivity and wage growth will be restored, given the unholy alliance in the American political economy of Republicans and neo-liberals. Still, as Kuttner argues

Even if we cannot manage to increase median wage growth, a modest adjustment in the Social Security tax base would be sufficient to balance its accounts for the next 75 years. Historically, about 90 percent of wage income has been subject to Social Security tax. But as the income distribution has become more unequal, only about 83 percent of payroll is now subject to tax. High income earners are only taxed on the first $106,800 of their earnings. If we restore the tax base to its historic level, nearly half the shortfall disappears.

To give the Administration the credit I rarely do, this appears to be roughly what the President had in mind when, according to the WSJ

In the Social Security deliberations, the White House considered raising the ceiling, currently $106,800, on wages subject to the payroll tax each year. The tax hits about 84% of wages earned in jobs covered by Social Security. The White House contemplated pushing that to about 90%, which would mean taxing the first $180,000 of wages.

Congratulations, Mr. President- for recognizing the need to raise the cap. But don't stop there- remove it altogether. Social Security, not being a welfare program, is not, and should not, be needs-based. Wealthy people, as do middle class and poor people, receive Social Security. There is little reason, meanwhile, not to require payment of Social Security tax on all income, especially as, unlike the income tax, the percentage remains the same as income rises (reduced to 4.2% for the employee, still 6.2% for the employer, under the recently enacted tax bill).


If the President truly wants to strengthen an already strong Social Security system, he would be foolish to propose allowing benefits to rise more slowly than at present, raise (gradually or otherwise) the eligibility age, or cut benefits in any other manner. It would be akin to a football team's placekicker intentionally kicking the ball out-of-bounds, enabling the receiving team to begin its drive at the 40-yard line. Instead, Mr. President, kick it into the end zone, proposing the progressive changes which would benefit Americans, allowing most of them to live out their later years without falling into poverty. Then, if Republicans want to cut (by any other name) the program, you can make it clear which party is on the side of elderly Americans and of what is probably the most popular governmental program in history.

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The Non-Compromise Compromise In The Works


When Barack Obama during this lame duck session came to a "compromise" with his friends, the Senate Republicans, on extension of tax cuts, it was widely hailed as a triumph for President Obama, and of bipartisanship. Extension of unemployment benefits for 13 months, we were told, was so important that it justified adoption of the GWBush tax policy. And anyway, the argument went, once the GOP took over one branch of Congress in January, it could only get much, much worse.

Those unreasonable, petulant, "professional liberals" complained that the President drove a very easy bargain, choosing to punt on first down, as Senator Franken put it. Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party apparatus, and the mainstream media just knew that Barack Obama forged a compromise by exerting presidential leadership as "the only adult in the room."

But we're beginning- albeit only just beginning- to get a sense of the danger brought about by the White House's penchant for bargaining against itself. One "concession" the Administration could have demanded was extension of the debt limit but that would have been, oh, perhaps contentious. And hurt the feelings of Republicans. On Sunday, Chris Matthews' favorite Republican Senator and icon of Inside Washington, Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, told Dick Gregory (transcript of segment here)

Well, to not raise the debt ceiling could be a default of the United States' bond and Treasury obligations. That would be very bad for, for the position of the United States in the world at large. But this is an opportunity to make sure the government is changing its spending ways. I will not vote for the debt ceiling increase until I see a plan in place that will deal with our long-term debt obligations, starting with Social Security, a real bipartisan effort to make sure that Social Security stays solvent, adjusting the age, looking at means tests for benefits....

I would suggest that if we're serious about taking America in a new direction, and you're not putting entitlement reform on the table, you've missed a great opportunity to change the course of America's future. And the last election was about change, Change that really will make us something other than Greece. I think Pat Toomey, Rand Paul, and other candidates who are new to the Congress have said during the campaign, "Everything's on the table when it comes to making America fiscally sound." Let's see if we can find bipartisan reforms in Social Security before we raise the debt limit.

It's not that the White House has been ignorant of the importance of raising the debt ceiling, a rather pro-forma action in every other Congress. Also yesterday, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Austan Goolsbee told Christiane Amanpour "the debt ceiling is not…is not something to toy with. That's the…the…if we hit the debt ceiling, that's the…essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic. I mean, that would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008."

The debt ceiling could have been part of The Grand Compromise. But it wasn't and now the "moderate" Lindsay Graham says he "will not vote for the debt ceiling increase until" there is "a real bipartisan effort" to increase the eligibility age, and means-testing, of Social Security.

Robert Kuttner recently maintained that President Obama will offer during his State of the Union address support for raising the eligibility age. It will be sold to Democratic members of Congress and to the left as a means to stave off the GOP's effort to privatize the system. Democratic heavyweight (speaking figuratively) Ed Rendell last week came out in support of the idea. Even Anthony Weiner of New York, a leading House liberal, steps clear on Face The Nation (transcript of segment here) of addressing benefit cuts, saying only "it is not a subject of compromise for many Democrats, privatizing Social Security. We just don't believe that's a good idea."

But it's not only the left and (presumably) congressional representatives from south Florida who oppose what will be marketed as "entitlement reform." Bloomberg Business Week reported that an AP/CNBC News poll taken in November found "nearly two-thirds oppose raising the retirement age to 69 for people to receive full Social Security benefits. Most oppose raising the retirement age even if done gradually over the next 65 years."

Those numbers will have to move if Social Security is to be undermined. "Social Security" will be replaced in the popular mind with "entitlements," meant to imply money greedy individuals believe they are entitled to, rather than from a fund built up by employers and employees themselves. Politicians and the media will continue to conflate the trust fund with general revenues, inferring that the system is driving up the deficit. People just are living so much longer, we will hear; details will remain a closely guarded secret because life expectancy at 65, particularly for people most in need, has little changed.

Generational warfare will be invoked; we'll be told- without being reminded the trust fund is in the black- that the young are being deprived. A proposal to raise the cap on contributing to the system, popular with the public, will be floated, only to be dropped later in the spirit of bipartisan "compromise" so popular with the media and this President.

It all will be done in the cause of reducing a deficit to which Social Security never has contributed. The cut will apply only to future retirees, who over the years have been fattened for the kill with misinformation and disinformation. Something, though, has to be sacrificed- and what better than a successful program which pays out guaranteed benefits year after year?

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Oncoming Malarkey


It's not like we haven't been warned.

When in February President Obama issued an Executive Order establishing the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, he set out as part of its mission to

propose recommendations that meaningfully improve the long-run fiscal outlook, including changes to address the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the Federal Government.

It was there in code- "entitlement spending"- so as to please the media and not alarm the people, but it refers to Social Security as well as Medicare and Medicaid.

Committee co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson in November released, ahead of the report of the full committee, their personal recommendations. No matter: when the committee issued its report in December, it included roughly the same recommendations as did its co-chairmen: change the formula for calculating cost-of-living adjustments, which would cut benefits; gradually increase the retirement age, which would effectively cut benefits; and in the case of the commission, "begin a broad dialogue on the importance of personal retirement savings." (For those of you with little patience for euphemism, that would be privatization.) Plus a couple of minor modifications.

Oh, and somewhat raising the cap on Social Security contributions. However, Robert Kuttner notes the plan "gets 92% of proposed Social Security savings from cutting benefits, and just 8 percent from increasing the income ceiling on payroll taxes."

Then Peter Orszag, on his way to CitiGroup as a vice-president, penned an op-ed in The New York Times acknowledging "Social Security is not a major contributor to our long-term deficits." Somehow, though, he managed to praise its recommendation in an ostensibly deficit-reduction commission because "the plan would not create private accounts within Social Security — the most controversial issue that came up when reform was last debated in 2005. Why not lock in a reform when private accounts are off the table?"

Orszag, we recall, served a stint as President Obama's director of the Office of Management and Budget and his willingness to sacrifice Social Security and his defensive reasoning ("oh, why not harm it so others don't harm it even more?) seem to echo the style of his ex-boss.

On December 16, Kuttner revealed "a scheme for the president to embrace much of the Bowles-Simpson plan — including cuts in Social Security. This is to be unveiled, according to well-placed sources, in the president’s State of the Union address."

Ed Rendell, far more happily, agrees. On The Ed (Schultz) Show Tuesday, the former Philadelphia mayor and outgoing Pennsylvania governor told guest host Cenk Uygur (video, below, from The Young Turks, Uygur's outfit) to consider "what the President is going to propose, I think, in his State of The Union," then went on to say

But if you tell me by 2050 we're going to raise the age of Social Security to 69, I don't have a problem with that because we'll all be living to 94, 95 years in life expectancy....

Barack Obama won't claim within a few decades "we'll all be living to 94, 95 years in age"- he's far too careful with details to come up with that whopper. But the myth that a life like Methuselah is just around the corner has been a necessary precursor to get people to accept a cut in benefits for the elderly (also keeping them in their jobs longer, a swell gift to the nation's young people.) And raising the retirement age has been where this Administration has been heading since before the deficit commission was formed.

Kuttner notes that Social Security is in surplus for the next 27 years and "what pushed" it "(very slightly) into the red is the fact that all the income gains have gone to the top." Few, however, on the right or among the moguls of bipartisanship will note the fiscal soundness of Social Security- which, understandably, from their perspective is "entitlement." And there will not be even a hint that any "crisis" (however contrived) is due to the widening gap between the wealthy and the rest of us. But you knew that.

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Link Of Two Issues, Slightly


You may not think gay rights and Social Security 'reform' have anything to do with each other. But they do, at least according to my sometimes bizarre way of thinking.

Brian Beutler, musing about "Why Republicans Gave In," argues

Republicans must at some level have understood that some of these things weren't going away. DADT would've stayed on the agenda. 9/11 responders would have stayed on the agenda. DREAM will stay on the agenda. And I'm guessing they made the simple calculation that it would be easier and wiser to give Dems these victories now, rather than fight it out with them publicly next after the GOP takes over the House with a caucus that's divided over these things.

Now the issues are off the table, and that creates more space for them to set the agenda.

Agreeing, Digby adds

DADT was endorsed by the military, START was endorsed by every Republican statesman dead or alive, including retired Generals by the bus load, and the 9/11 responders bill was to benefit a bunch of cops and firemen. At the end of the day, the GOP has always been a sucker for a man in a uniform.

But if START was approved because the only legitimate reason to oppose it would have been allegedly insufficient verification procedures- and that would have required a debate on details, not a GOP staple- and the 9/11 bill ultimately was approved because 9/11/01 is cheap politics for some, Don't Ask, Don't Tell involved another dynamic.

Repeal of DADT may be a boon for the military. Or it may be a bust for the military. More likely, it will be neither. But it surely is a milestone for gay rights in this nation. For a member of Congress to have voted to maintain DADT would have been as antithetical to the gay agenda- and in some quarters, discriminatory. That would not be an easy vote to make for a legislator who knows someone who is, or may be, gay.

Now that President Obama has partially mollified his left base with a victory on DADT and on nuclear arms reduction, it is time for him to swing right. And, according to Robert Kuttner, it appears he will do so on economic policy, possibly announcing at the January State of the Union address his support for much of the neo-liberal, moderately conservative proposals of "deficit" committee co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson.

They would include measures to cut Social Security. Paul Krugman explains

The proximate cause is that cutting Social Security is one of those things you’re for if you’re a Very Serious Person. Way back, I wrote that inside the Beltway calling for Social Security cuts is viewed as a “badge of seriousness”, which has nothing to do with the program’s real importance or lack thereof to the budget picture; that column elicited a more or less hysterical reaction, which sort of proved the point. (Looking back at the column, I was surprised to see that it was about the ISP himself; tales of a debacle foretold.)

But why Social Security? There was a telling moment in 2004, during one of the presidential campaign debates. Tim Russert, the moderator, asked eight or nine questions about Social Security, trying to put the candidates on the spot, while asking not once about Medicare, which serious people – as opposed to Serious People – know is the real heart of the story. Why the focus on Social Security?

The answer, I suspect, has to do with class.

When medical expenses are big, they’re big; even the very affluent are grateful when Medicare pays the bills for their mother-in-laws bypass or dialysis. The importance of Medicare, in short, is obvious to all but the very rich.

Social Security, by contrast, is something that matters enormously to the bottom half of the income distribution, but no so much to people in the 250K-plus club. A 30 percent cut in benefits would represent disaster for tens of millions of Americans, but a barely noticeable inconvenience for VSPs and everyone they know. A rise in the retirement age would be a vast hardship for people who do manual labor, but if anything a gift to VSPs, who don’t want to step aside in any case. And so on down the line.

So going after Social Security is a way to seem tough and serious — but entirely at the expense of people you don’t know.

As these pie charts The New York Times found at the Employee Benefit Research Institute (estimates from the March 2008 Current Population Survey) indicate, elderly Americans in the lowest quintile receive 88.4% of their income from Social Security while those in the highest quintile obtain only 18.6% of their income from Social Security.



The inability to relate to those Americans who most need Social Security goes deeper than politicians who know far more people who need this insurance than those who don't. Lamenting the distortion of the debate emanating from the mainstream media, William Greider maintains

The core fact is that Social Security has not contributed a dime to the deficit, but has piled up trillions in surpluses, which the government has borrowed and spent. Social Security’s surpluses have actually offset the impact of the deficit, beginning with Reagan.

Nevertheless

the elites who don’t want to talk about this—because if people understand that Social Security has a $2.5 trillion surplus, building toward more than $4 trillion, people will ask why are politicians trying to cut Social Security benefits?

Noting "the owners of their publications.... think pretty much what the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce think, Greider states that reporters

are so embedded in the established way of understanding things (and) as media ownership became highly concentrated, the gulf between the governing elites, both in and out of government, and the broad range of ordinary citizens has gotten much worse. The press chose to side with the governing elites and look down on the citizenry as ignorant or irrational, greedy, or even nutty.

So, as DADT is washed away, we may see Social Security not washed away but eroded by a media elite anxious to encourage Republican and Democratic politicians who are unable or unwilling to understand its critical role in American life.



MERRY CHRISTMAS

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A Timid Presidency

On May 7, prior to the nomination of Elena Kagan to the United States Supreme Court, New Republic legal expert Jeffrey Rosen wrote of his admiration for possible choices Merrick Garland, Diane Wood, and Kagan. Nevertheless, he lamented, "none of the leading candidates for the Court appears to be an economic populist (and) like all the current members of the Roberts Court, Democratic and Republican alike, none can be described as an economic populist in the Brandeis or Douglas tradition."

Rosen explains that the dearth of Justices committed to economic is partly because

Since the 1960s, grassroots progressives have focused on non-economic issues: reproductive choice, for example, or civil liberties in an age of terrorism. That means that the current Supreme Court candidates had their legal sensibilities shaped in a political environment that was less preoccupied with questions of economic justice. There is simply no contemporary equivalent to the Progressive movement out of which Brandeis emerged, and there hasn’t been in a long time.

That’s a shame, because the most important issues the Roberts Court will confront over the next decade involve the constitutionality of environmental measures and economic regulations passed in the wake of the crash of 2008. In contrast to the Warren Court era, these battles will pit conservative judicial activists (who will be attempting to use the courts to reverse political defeats) against liberal proponents of judicial restraint (who will be seeking to uphold laws enacted by Congress).

Little chance that The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner would disagree. In the same way that "the progressive legal community needs to begin focusing on issues of economic justice," as Rosen argues, Kuttner points to "the teachable moments" which lately have arisen. The "details of the government's civil fraud case against Goldman Sachs; the gruesome and needless corporate murder of miners in West Virginia; the BP oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico; and then to complete the circle, the stock market going berserk because a technical error caused a domino effect of computerized automatic selling" all offer the nation's Chief Executive a golden opportunity to use the bully pulpit to explain "why the private profit motive cannot be relied upon without some steering or harnessing mechanism by government."

Though a nearly unparalleled orator, the President seems unable or unwilling to make this argument. Instead

You might think, with these well timed gifts, that a progressive president would demonstrate leadership. Had the tables been turned, and the government rather than the private market perpetrated a series of disasters, you can just imagine how Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush and their strategists would have gone to town.

But after 16 months of pummeling by the right, this presidency is still pursuing his Quixotic quest for common ground. Obama's most notable speech in recent weeks was his May 1 commencement address at the University of Michigan. The White House had plenty of time to decide what message the president wanted to send. It was characteristic Obama and the president had some very good lines about the importance of government:

"Government is the police officers who are protecting our communities, and the servicemen and women who are defending us abroad. (Applause.) Government is the roads you drove in on and the speed limits that kept you safe. Government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them. (Applause.) Government is this extraordinary public university -- a place that's doing lifesaving research, and catalyzing economic growth, and graduating students who will change the world around them in ways big and small. (Applause.)"
But then he said this:

Now, the second way to keep our democracy healthy is to maintain a basic level of civility in our public debate....[so] if you're somebody who only reads the editorial page of The New York Times, try glancing at the page of The Wall Street Journal once in a while. If you're a fan of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, try reading a few columns on the Huffington Post website. It may make your blood boil; your mind may not be changed. But the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship. (Applause.) It is essential for our democracy. (Applause.)

Now, while we should appreciate the plug for the Huffington Post, there is something profoundly offensive about the presumption of moral equivalence....as if we are fringe left the way Limbaugh is fringe right. The fact is that Limbaugh, Beck, and the Wall Street Journal routinely lie. HuffPost and the New York Times editorial page don't. And while writers like me push Obama to be more resolute and more effective, we don't demonize him. Obama's juxtaposition of the moderate left and the lunatic right as both worthy of attention reminds me of Robert Frost's definition of a liberal as the fellow who is so high minded that he won't take his own side in an argument.

It's hard to tell whether like the last Democratic president, Obama is a triangulator, a neo-liberal in liberal clothing or simply risk-averse. Perhaps he has very progressive insticts but is an unusually cautious politician, as when he refuses to move aggressively to rescind Don't Ask, Don't Tell, an unpopular policy with the populace but one which the military prefers he revoke only with all due deliberate speed; or to bring a speedier end to the Iraq War. But more important is his reticence in dealing with the financial crisis, wherein his Administration has shown little or no support for the boldest, and necessary, measures to address the stranglehold the mega-banks have on the economy. Clearly, the President will support only the most minimal change unless the left exerts upon him its influence. But as Digby puts it, "the Right is freaky enough to keep the left wary of going too far in challenging him."

Whether the right is "freaky" or reactionary or hateful, President Obama is able to keep the progressive community at bay by invoking the specter of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Jim DeMint, or Fox News. And he need not often refer to them because these avatars of the far right are ever-present, with the implication from the Administration that Barack Obama is the only thing standing between those extremists and their bid to control the country.

But if President Obama continues on the path he has so far chosen, the rallying crys of "Si Se Puede" or the slightly creepy "we are the ones we've been waiting for" increasingly will appear as empty campaign slogans.

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Better Quote Of The Week

"If the orgy of financial deregulation that led to the crash had two prime sponsors, the Democratic one was Rubin and the Republican one was Greenspan. Inviting these characters to a fiscal summit to devise a way out of the crisis is like inviting arsonists to design a seminar on fire prevention."

Journalist, writer, and economist Robert Kuttner, criticizing composition of the fiscal summit sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation