Obama Needs A Budget to Match his Progressive Ideals

By Katrina vanden Heuvel
Washgington Post
April 19, 2011

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-budget-plan-progressives-should-embrace/2011/04/18/AF7gSG5D_story.html

For perhaps the first time since being sworn into
office, President Obama has articulated, in eloquent
terms, what it means to be a progressive. In his budget
speech last week, he spoke of our obligation to the
broader community to provide a basic level of security
and dignity. Speaking of programs such as Medicare,
Medicaid and Social Security, he said what every good
progressive believes: "We would not be a great country
without those commitments."

He fused a defense of progressive governance with a
scathing critique of Paul Ryan's cruel budget, which
all but four Republican House members have now voted
for. And he demanded that the rich finally pay their
fair share, vowing to let the Bush tax cuts expire. It
was a powerful speech, in many ways reassuring to
progressives who have been demoralized by a president
who appeared missing in action.

But rhetoric and policy are not the same thing. And in
this case, as in far too many, the policy agenda the
president has laid out is not worthy of, in his words,
"the America we believe in."

To begin with, the president continues to let
Republicans define the playing field in almost every
instance. Why is the debate we are having not about
whether to cut, but how much to cut? Why isn't it about
the urgency of joblessness instead of the perils of
deficits? The budget the president proposed is clearly
influenced by a discredited conservative economic
worldview. It shouldn't be accepted as the
"progressive" alternative in the negotiations soon to
come.

What's worse is that, even on this narrow playing
field, the president isn't fighting harder for those
who need government's support the most. He has
jettisoned the Keynesian thinking this era demands,
prematurely embracing what might be described an
austerity-lite policy, one that all but guarantees mass
unemployment as the new normal.

In his speech, he spoke eloquently of how there was
"nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from
those who can least afford it and don't have any clout
on Capitol Hill." Nothing courageous, indeed. And yet
it is President Obama who has said that for every $1 in
tax increases, we should create $2 in spending cuts.
Faced with the choice between new cuts to the social
safety net and new taxes for the richest few, it is not
just Paul Ryan but President Obama whose acceptance of
the way this choice is framed leaves the poor
shouldering most of the burden.

The most progressive president since Lyndon Johnson
should be willing to embrace a bolder opening gambit.
He should not be so willing to compromise on principle,
even when ultimate compromise may be necessary. Real
leadership might require compromise, but it cannot be
defined by compromise. It must instead be defined by a
clear vision for the future, and most important, a
willingness to defend it. It should be focused not on
what is possible, but instead, on the most that is
possible; not the path of least resistance, but the
path of maximum potential benefit.

Failing to do so is what can produce a Tea Party
budget, such as the one adopted last week. As Paul
Krugman put it in his column this week, the two parties
"don't just live in different moral universes, they
also live in different intellectual universes." Any
embrace or acceptance of that Republican universe by
the White House is a retreat from the reforms this
country desperately needs - and was promised.

Yet the president has again telegraphed his willingness
to compromise, admitting in his speech that he did not
"expect the details in any final agreement to look
exactly like the approach" he laid out. What, then,
does he expect it will look like?

The further right this process moves - whether as a
result of a political system warped and broken by
corporate interests protecting their privilege, or
lobbyists actively gutting reform - the more
disheartening the definition of victory becomes. Is
merely preventing Republicans from ending Medicare what
victory looks like now? Yes, we need a defensive
opposition, but while Democrats control the Senate and
the White House, they cannot act merely as a minority
party. Shouldn't they be laying out a clear vision of a
sustainable and fair economy? As the extremists take
over the GOP, is the Democratic Party really going to
be content to define success so modestly?

There are at least 83 Democratic members of the House
who believe that we cannot exclude alternatives that
would solve this economic challenge more justly and
fairly. They believe we must challenge the limits of
our narrowing debate and expand, as President Obama
once called it, "our moral imagination."

They are the members of the Congressional Progressive
Caucus (CPC), who last week introduced what they are
calling the "People's Budget," an alternative both to
President Obama's proposal and the unconscionable Ryan
Budget.

It lays out what a robust progressive agenda should
look like. It protects the social safety net, promotes
a progressive tax policy and makes significant cuts to
the Pentagon by bringing our troops home from Iraq and
Afghanistan. It actually generates a surplus by 2021,
according to Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the CPC.

This is the kind of budget our president should be
proposing. This is the kind of budget the progressive
community should be rallying around. One that makes
millionaires, billionaires and corporations pay their
fair share. One that protects the poor and middle
class. But it is the kind of budget that establishment
Democrats and media elites are inclined to ignore and
dismiss.

We can be, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph
Stiglitz recently put it, a country "of the 1%, for the
1%, by the 1%." Or we can be a country that believes in
- and embraces - shared sacrifice. A country not
defined by the greed of the few but by the needs of the
many.

That's the only kind of America really worth believing
in.
______________

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The
Nation. She writes a weekly online column for The Post.

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