Did President Obama make the case for a “fair” debt deal?
Arena Asks: President Barack Obama called on the American people Monday night to send the message to Congress that it must approve a “balanced” approach to resolving the stalemate over the debt ceiling and deficit.
Will the president’s latest plea for a “fair” compromise spur lawmakers to a deal? Are these public appearances helping the president’s cause?
My Answer: Personally, I’m sick and tired of Obama’s “balanced” approach. I think he must put forward a much stronger agenda to draw the debate closer to his position and engage people emotionally in his vision for the future if he wants to break the logjam.
As Boehner’s response showed, the Republicans see any plea for compromise and balance as blood in the water, an enticement to go after the wounded beast ever more viciously. Despicable is the only word for their intransigence. Their disdain for fairness tickles their base into ecstasy. Are they too full of themselves to see that they are eating the seed corn? Or are they simply too tethered to their extremist base to be able to budge? In either case, their foolish fealty to the Tea Party’s pledges brought us to this precipice.
The president has plenty of room to call the Republicans out on that. He did it well in his speech and should do lots more of it. But that’s simply not enough to stop the Kabuki theater that’s playing like a never ending video loop while the entire world collectively bites its nails.
Yes, the president has to keep talking to the American people. Yes, it’s important for him to remain calm and to explain over and over how the debt has become swollen from Republicans’ unwillingness to allocate the tax burden fairly while being all too willing to start financially draining wars and raise the debt ceiling whenever the sitting president was a Republican. (Check out Ezra Klein’s succinct graphs which illustrate this…) But what will really make the difference is for him to commit to a plan for moving forward with or without them.
The president does have the harder task than the Republicans who merely need to say “no.” But then, that’s why he was elected. I say, less balance and more boldness, please.
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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That was all Obama said about the wars. He is on shaky ground to complain about them, because he has not brought the troops home; he transferred some from Iraq to Afghanistan, replacing them with mercenaries who cost even more than troops. Not to mention, he escalated the attacks on Pakistan, Yemen, and who knows what he expects to accomplish in Libya. He mentioned cutting “defense” spending by hundreds of billions. What, over ten years? That is a drop in the bucket.
One way or another, this nation will have to drop its pretensions of military supremacy. It is far too costly, in more ways than the obvious. In what sense is this the greatest nation in the world, anyway? China is vying with USA to be the most environmentally destructive nation, and will soon be a greater economic power, if it is not already, so to what does that claim refer, besides military power? Obama concludes,
Is that a leap of faith, or a joke? What is he talking about? Politics in this nation is broken. The two party system creates such scenarios where any real solutions must be kept out of the debate, because both parties are utterly dependent on corporate sponsorship. They can blame each other all they want, but who do they think they are fooling? Is there any wonder that more people identify as independents than either Democrats or Republicans, the disapproval rate of Congress is staggering, and these trends are accelerating?
Aletha, I appreciate thtat you question underlying assumptions.
I have to. As I see it, the constraints imposed by the underlying assumptions of political reality have gotten us into this mess. The alternatives posed by the mainstream are not the best we can do. Far from it, but of course the mainstream likes to cast better ideas as impractical, utopian, unrealistic, pie in the sky, you know the drill. As long as the status quo is making the rich richer, the powers that be will oppose anything that would rock their boat. Even when the machinations of Wall Street came close to throwing the world into depression, what was the mainstream response? Bail out Wall Street!