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Obama
bought himself time
by
Gene Lyons
If anybody wanted to erect a statue
of President Obama after his first two years, the unofficial
White House motto should be engraved on the base: "Thank you, Sir. May
I have another?"
To liberal Democrats, Obama's putative bargain with Republican leaders
extending the Bush
millionaires' tax cuts for two years amounted to craven surrender. Is
there nothing this president
will fight for? Has his vision of himself as a transformative figure,
his sheer narcissism, made him
confuse the rough-and-tumble of Washington with the genteel precincts
of the Harvard Law Review?
Or did he simply get rolled? Blackmailed? Bullied into submission by
ruthless adversaries who see
his conciliatory efforts as a sign of weakness? The left-leaning
Huffington Post headline read:
"Obama Caves, the Rich Save."..
Maybe it's because I'm lucky enough to have a decent job, and maybe
because I never envisioned
Obama as a political messiah to begin with, but an awful lot of this
commentary strikes me as overwrought.
But what about the politics of the
thing?
If the White House gave up
something that, realistically speaking, it had already lost in the
November elections, GOP leaders made big concessions, too. By
bargaining with Obama,
they made it harder to portray him as a Socialist Demiurge out to
destroy capitalism.
They conceded him a legitimacy the professional right has denied him
for two years.
I don't know - is that a
victory?
Getting the other side to
admit you might not be the
anti-Christ?
Who knows? Maybe he'll turn out to be right on this...