Fight on Obama on Policy, Not Re-Election

Whatever the president comes up with on the completely unncessary debt limit idiocy, the result is not going to create jobs, punish Wall Street, save people's homes or secure the social safety net.

Nor will it, no matter how horrible, be a reason to not vote for him next year.

Digby:

That's why the President's liberal critics are mad, not because they don't believe in compromise. They simply don't agree that we should "want to get our fiscal house in order" by cutting SS benefits or raising the Medicare age or throwing a bunch of poor people off the health care rolls while the wealthy are making huge profits and income inequality grows and grows and grows. And we certainly aren't persuaded that once we do that we will be able to pursue all kinds of wonderful programs that require new spending. That's fatuous and frankly, insulting.

There are alternatives out there if deficit reduction is so damned important. The House Democrats' plan, for instance, which I doubt the White House has even bothered to read since they had already offered up half the New Deal before it even came out. There's also the pending expiration of the Bush tax cuts. The fact that their reinstatement alone would substantially solve the problem should tell people something about the cause of the deficit. I realize that nobody wants to raise any taxes, ever, but nobody's even tried to make the argument for doing it to solve the deficit so we don't have any clue how it would come out.

And in any case, the deficit issue itself is a disaster capitalist construct designed to confuse people into thinking that this is the cause of their problems when it is actually a symptom of a larger one that nobody wants to deal with. Even engaging in it at this point it is a capitulation to magical thinking and up-is-downism along the lines of the Iraq war debate. It seems this is what we do now (on a totally bipartisan basis, so that's nice): we make our serious problems worse by putting all our energies into "solving" those that are irrelevant.(And botching even that.) It's the sign of a totally dysfunctional system led by people who either don't know or don't care enough to fix it. It's monumentally depressing.

Mike Lux at Crooks and Liars:

But if this deal does as much damage to the middle class and poor as is currently rumored, if any tax increases are fudged so that might not even happen at all, then I think progressives have to declare all-out war on the deal and try to rally Democratic members of the House and Senate to vote against it and defeat it.

I want to be clear: I don’t believe that means declaring war on the President. The idea of Bachmann or Romney or one of these other Ryan-budget loving extremists as President, with these Republicans in charge of Congress, is a mortal threat to everything any progressive person, or for that matter any of the 80 percent of Americans who care about the middle class, cares about. Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and Pell Grants would likely be gone, not just cut, by the time they were through. We still have to help get Obama re-elected, no matter how much we oppose him on specific issues. But just because you support his re-election doesn’t mean you have to support a terrible budget deal. If it is as bad as it looks like it might be, we have to leave no stone unturned in tracking down every Democratic vote to beat this bill. As bad as a default will be, and it would be very bad for the economy, decimating the middle class for generations would be worse. I also think if a bad deal goes down, the President and Congressional leaders would very quickly pass a version of the McConnell compromise, which would not be nearly as damaging as a bad deal.

We live in dark times, and they will get darker if the President is not re-elected. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the Democratic Party has to support him when he is wrong on policy.

Liberals know that Barack Obama is not our ally, but we also know that republicans are our enemy.