Barack Obama took to the Rose Garden to give what was advertised as a deficit reduction speech. And, in fact, it sounded a lot like a deficit reduction speech, but only if you weren’t listening closely.
What it was, actually, was a teleprompter-aided ransom note.
This time, Obama said, he’s taking the hostage — and he hoped he sounded just crazy enough that someone will believe he means it.
Obama has learned. He learned that his liberal base demands that he get tough, stake out a position and stick to it. He learned it just in time for, yeah, a re-election campaign.
Republicans were crying “Class warfare!” before Obama even released his plan. Class warfare apparently means any tax hike on any rich person. But Obama shot back that the war was on numbers — and a refusal to see the need for addition as well as subtraction.
“This is not class warfare,” he said. “It’s math.” (Note to Rick Perry: It’s not higher math, just arithmetic.)
Obama finally learned that Republicans, particularly House Republicans, play a mean game of chicken and have made it a point of honor (or dishonor, depending on your world view) to never compromise on taxes, even if they have to run the country off a cliff in the process — and even if Ron Paul wouldn’t treat any of the injured unless churches agree to pick up the bill.
The funny thing is, Obama actually learned these things during the phony debt-crisis crisis, in which hostage-taking Republicans knew that Obama would never let the country go into default.
And so, in resolving the non-crisis crisis, he and Republicans agreed to more cuts and the all-important trigger, which comes if there’s no supercommittee bill. And if a bill is all cuts, Obama will veto it.
The pen may or not be mightier than the sword in all cases. But it works here. And we know the identity of the hostage, even if Obama never said the name — the $600 billion that would come from the Pentagon budget if there no deal is reached.
Obama doesn’t need a deal. He’s got the threat of a no-deal. If there is no deal, the $1.2 trillion trigger goes into effect. It’ll never be pulled, of course, since Congress can change the rules at will.
But this is theater, and you know what Chekhov (sort of) said: If a veto pen is introduced in the first act, inks will be spilled by the third.
Will Republicans have the nerve to go all Paul Ryan again and pass a bill raising the age for Medicare recipients — the deal Obama was floating during the Grand Bargain Days — and let Obama hammer them on the notion they want to hammer seniors?
Will they have the nerve to pass a bill Obama has promised to veto — and just see what happens?
There’s another question. Will Obama have the nerve to tough it out?
It’s not exactly Obama’s style. He famously (or infamously, depending again on your world view) looks for compromise, even when he’s squinting in the morning Rose Garden sun.
In any case, he can do the math. And if Tim Geithner won’t get the numbers for him, economist Bruce Bartlett — the old Reagan supply- side guy and now a supply-side apostate — has supplied them.
On the blog Capital Gains and Games, Bartlett aggregated 27 polls that asked the question whether the deficit should be reduced by cuts alone or with cuts and taxes.
You can probably guess the answer. The poll average was 30 percent for cuts alone and 64.5 percent for a mix.
Obama has support from a few billionaires begging him to raise their taxes — even as their accountants object — and he is cleverly calling his millionaire minimum tax the Buffett Rule, which works better than, say, the Soros Rule.
And it’s easy to point out the flaws in the argument that cutting taxes is the only way to create jobs. With his massive tax cuts, George W. Bush had the worst record of job creation of any president since the Labor Department started keeping records in 1939. You could look it up.
But this is Obama’s problem, not Bush’s. And the 2012 election will be about what to do next about the economy.
Here’s one option: Every Republican candidate has helpfully raised his or her hand in opposition to a hypothetical deficit deal offering $10 in budget cuts to every $1 in tax hikes.
No one, in real life, would actually refuse that deal. But Obama has the video. And the threat — which he’ll certainly carry out — is that he’ll show the raised hands in every campaign ad he makes.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
