Some speculation has arisen as to the strategy of the
President in these opening weeks of his second term. The speculation regards his motives. Motives are difficult to discern. In any case, I find the comments, from
both liberal and conservative sources, to be disturbing. Let us explore it for a few moments.
According to the Washington Examiner, President Obama is
just 42 days into his second term in the White House but he is already done
governing. As The Washington Post reported this weekend, Obama is already
“executing plans to win back the House in 2014, which he and his advisers believe
will be crucial to the outcome of his second term and to his legacy as
president.” “The goal,” The Washington Post reports, “is to flip the
Republican-held House back to Democratic control, allowing Obama to push
forward with a progressive agenda on gun control, immigration, climate change
and the economy during his final two years in office, according to
congressional Democrats, strategists and others familiar with Obama’s
thinking.”
As they see it, Obama is done trying to work with
Republicans in 2013 and 2014. He is abandoning any real effort for bipartisan
immigration, gun, or energy reform. The bulk of his effort will now be devoted
to eliminating all Republican power in Washington. The first step in the
campaign for the mid-term election is to maximize the amount of pain the
sequester inflicts on the American people. ABC News reports: “Now that the
sequester has gone into effect — bringing on the spending cuts Obama once
guaranteed would never happen — the president is in the awkward place of
rooting for it be felt as he and his administration has predicted.”
Their conclusion is that for perhaps the first time in the
history of the United States, it is in the political interest of a president to
inflict maximum pain on the American people. They think that Obama could have
spent the last 16 months preparing to mitigate sequestration’s impact on the
American people, as any responsible manager would have. Instead, he has done
the opposite, explicitly ordering government agencies not to prepare for the
worst. And he has refused all Republican efforts to pass legislation that would
minimize the sequester’s pain.
I hope I am not being unfair in suggesting that this approach
reminds me of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, RULE 9: “The threat is usually
more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more
consequences than any activist.” One way to interpret the behavior of the
Administration is to create in the imagination of government workers and
citizens the worst possible scenario during these next few months.
Michael Barone said it appears Obama prefers delivering such
messages to crowds of adoring supporters over actually governing. For support,
he points to Washington Post's Bob Woodward. He is continuing to make it clear,
as he did in his book "The Price of Politics," that it was Obama's
then-chief of staff and now Treasury Secretary Jack Lew who first proposed the
dreaded sequester. The point is that the president who first proposed the
sequester, then promised it would never happen and then denounced it when it
seemed clear it would.
Tom Brokaw said in an interview that the fact is that
Speaker Boehner is right. Let the Senate come in here and start to play with
this a little bit. Where is their budget? The president can start his budget
process over there. He thinks the president spent entirely too much time in the
last two weeks campaigning, in effect, all around the country, lining up that
Saturday Night Live parody. All those people who will be affected, when he
ought to have been at Camp David and said to Boehner and his team, and members
of the Republican side in the Senate, 'Bring the leadership up here, let's
spend five days showing the public that we are interested in trying to make a
heroic effort to get a deal here. Can't make any calls out to anybody else
except maybe your press representatives but not to your caucus members. We're
going to sit here and negotiate this. You're the leaders of the Congress, I'm
the leader of the country. We've got to find a way to work this out.' (The
Cycle, March 4, 2013)
Yet, this strategy is consistent with Saul Alinsky, Rules
for Radicals, RULE 10: "The major premise for tactics is the development
of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
It is the unceasing pressure that will result in the reaction of the opposition
that is essential for the success of the campaign. The rule suggests to me that
any cooperation with the House, any actual solution to the matters before the
nation, would ease the pressure on Republicans.
I would like to think that these persons I have mentioned, from
conservative and liberal sources, are wrong. Further, I am not comfortable
trying to discern the motives of a person. Even if true, all it might mean is
that the President thinks that Democrat control of every branch of government would
be best for the country, so it is worth inflicting some pain now on citizens to
accomplish that objective. Yet, even then, such a tactic seems devious.
I share this because it seems as if conventional wisdom is
that Obama has an interest in inflicting as much as pain as possible through
the sequester, confirming in the minds of some voters the evil intent of
Republicans. It runs counter to the previous conventional wisdom that for at
least a few months, the President and Congress would actually govern in the
best interest of the nation.
Let me say it directly. If I were in his shoes, I would have
welcomed the opportunity to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse” of the system,
including all the expensive retreats about which we have been reading. The President
wants us as citizens to assume that the level of federal government spending is
“lean and mean,” and therefore, any cut must be to essential services. As I write
this, I find it ridiculous, but I assume also that many Americans lean toward
accepting its truth. The President wants a “balanced” approach, when in
reality, major tax increases are already in place. The sequester, as designed
by Obama and approved by both houses in Congress, is about spending. Its design,
by our political leaders, was not balance, but spending.
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