(Manufactured) Crisis Averted

In which Barack Obama has every reason in the world to begin smoking again.

The U.S. Senate has passed the debt deal hammered out by Congress yesterday that will slash government spending for the next decade without raising a cent of new revenue. For liberally minded individuals, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post argues that “this is a bad deal that is made considerably less bad by the way its details are engineered,” considering that Medicare has been spared, defence spending will be reined in, and debt ceiling issues won't be raised until after the 2012 election. Beyond that, though, there isn't too much to be happy about. Far worse than any budgetary fallout, Robinson worries, is that “the tea party zealots who cowed the [Republican] party into rejecting all proposals for new revenue will only feel emboldened, not just in their anti-tax fantasy but in their technique of threatening to wreck the economy if they don't get their way.” Such is democracy, though. Perhaps there's a lesson in this for grassroots activists on the left side of the spectrum.

Although, if you're Joe Nocera of The New York Times, that tactic is tantamount to “waging jihad” against the United States. Political arguments aside, the debt deal overlooked, and likely even compounded, the country's growing unemployment problem (a train of thought espoused by none other than David Frum over the weekend, too). “The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession,” says Nocera. Economic growth is the best remedy for unemployment, which is currently hovering around 9.2 per cent (with something like one in five men in the States effectively not working due to incarceration, disability, unemployment, or underemployment). In a recession, governments are just about the only institutions willing to fund new employment. Cutting out their legs from underneath them for the next decade is “guaranteed to make it worse.” While we'd hesitate to call that jihad, we will call it narrow-minded and self-defeating, but you already knew that.

Writing in the National Post and elsewhere, George F. Will gives the GOP its campaign slogan for 2012: “Is this the best we can do?” Will says that the president's handling of the debt deal shows him to be a political naif, as he's manoeuvred himself into a position where “he dare not run as a liberal but cannot run from his liberalism.” What, the liberalism that consigned $1.2 trillion of government largesse to the trash bin, or the one that killed Osama bin Laden? If there's anything to be learned about Obama from this mess, it is not that he's a neutered liberal, it's that he's consistently taken non-partisan stances on nearly every matter that's passed through the Oval Office since 2009. More than ever, he appears to be the first true “independent” president, especially now that he's made a few enemies in his party in the past 48 hours. It's definitely not the president's best week in office, but it's not as though his political rivals – Democrats and Republicans alike – have come out of the process shining either.