Collective Conscious

On tax pol­icy: Obama 1, Repub­li­cans 1, Lib­er­als 0.

On appro­pri­a­tions: Obama 1, Repub­li­cans 1, Lib­er­als 0.

With the essen­tial omnibus pulled, the Sen­ate has to move quickly to avoid a gov­ern­ment shut­down. But Obama doesn’t mind: he’s made nice with the GOP over the tax cut and shown them he’s will­ing to drag lib­er­als through the mud to work with the GOP. Clin­ton pio­neered this strat­egy in his term and made some great pol­icy, and Barack has lately shown a hope to fol­low “Good Old Bill” down that road.

Now, that’s not the best news for lib­er­als — but Obama never has been. Since the health care debate he’s been pri­mar­ily fix­ated on get­ting the best pos­si­ble pol­icy out of every moment, and he’s been largely suc­cess­ful at it. Unfor­tu­nately this often means los­ing the pol­i­tics, because it means work­ing within the bro­ken sys­tem we already have. But it’s his choice; not a vision­ary one but a prac­ti­cal one.

We’ll sur­vive the next two years, but rad­i­cal change is unlikely. It’s only the con­tin­u­ing inter­nal right­ward self-​​destruction of the Repub­li­can Party that will keep pol­i­tics inter­est­ing — Democ­rats have not yet shown a propen­sity to fight with them­selves via pri­maries, etc. What we may see on the left, how­ever, is a con­tin­ued ten­sion between the center-​​left and the left-​​left; it’s unlikely to lead to a real party rift (as in the UK, for exam­ple), but only because of the two-​​party pull of pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics. As always, stay tuned.