Some liberals argue Obama's three-dimensional chess is finally paying off.
Ari MelberThere’s so much fake drama in Washington that it gets hard to recognize big developments when they actually happen. By any measure, though, Republican leaders are offering a massive reversal to their debt threats.
Senator McConnell’s proposal gives Obama everything on substance, in return for concessions on optics.
In essence, under the plan, the debt ceiling gets raised without spending cuts, but the vote is structured so it looks like Obama is pulling the lever alone. And then he has to pull it again in several, politically risky increases. For Republicans, as The Nation’s George Zornick reports, “it’s a stunning de-leveraging” of their hard-fought position. “After spending much of 2011 threatening to execute the economy unless they get their way,” Zornick explains, “McConnell is now proposing to just release the hostage [without] one scrap of policy concessions from Democrats.”
The deal looks like a big win for progressives—never a conventional narrative in Washington, so it probably won’t be covered that way—and some liberals argue it casts Obama’s negotiating in a very different light. Lawrence O’Donnell, who held a senior staff position in the Senate long before his fame as a liberal anchor, proposes that Obama was never really threatening Medicare, he was ratcheting up pressure on a GOP caucus that could not stomach any revenue increases at all.
“Nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to [in these marathon legislative bargaining sessions],” O’Donnell stresses, and thus many observers (and progressive critics) misread Obama’s true position. Political junkies are fairly tired of the “three-dimensional chess” defense of every Obama move, but this time the theory makes some sense. O’Donnell’s ten-minute presentation is also one of the clearest explanations of the default showdown available, so it’s worth watching for that reason alone:
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Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.