Kuttner Gets It Wrong

Let slip the yippy little dogs of punditry.

Robert Kuttner at the American Prospect gets it wrong.

This may sound churlish at such a moment, but in addition to blaming the recklessness of today’s Republican party, the man who deserves substantial blame for this impending economic doomsday is Barack Obama. For two and a half years, he has been all but training the Republicans, Pavlov fashion, to keep rejecting compromise. He has done this by rewarding them with a treat every time they up the ante or move the goal posts.

It's not that it's churlish, Robert, it's that it's wrong.

The House is insane, or at least as insane as an institution can be.  This focus on Obama's conciliatory style misses by a mile the world view of the Tea Party.  They don't see a compromising centrist, they see a Socialist-Communist-Dictator.  They literally believe that.

They see his passage of ACA as a goon driven, arm twisting abuse of liberty.  They see the Stimulus as dictatorial infringements on the market.  If you see the world that way, you are not looking to take advantage of a pragmatic sense of compromise, you are looking to defeat the source of evil and the root of despotism.

That's how these idiots think.

Bush was Manichean in his outlook towards the world.  "You're either with us or against us."  But he could recognize the benefits of working with someone like Ted Kennedy.  He eventually had a rapprochment with Clinton.  He was simple minded about a lot of things, but as a politician, he sought out people.

These jackalopes have taken the worst aspect of Bush's worldview and doubled down on it.

Obama - and frankly most centrists, from Mike Bloomberg to Tom Friedman to Cokie Roberts - have operated on the presumption that the House GOP is willing to govern and a lot of this posturing was just rhetoric.

And they probably believed it because they were talking to Boehner and McConnell who treat it as such.

But what we learned last night was that while Boehner may use extreme rhetoric as a negotiating tool, the House itself is so extreme that he can't pass bills with his caucus.

This is what caused Obama to lose his cool at the presser a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, Obama will compromise in order to govern the country.  Just like EVERY president has done.  Did he compromise too much?  We still don't have a deal, so I don't see how you can say that he has.

But what we have learned - or we should have learned by now - is that if you DON'T compromise, you get the debacle that we had last night.

The problem - first, second and last - is the House GOP.  They have engineered a crisis.  Not because they think Obama is a bad negotiator but because they are ignorant and insane.

UPDATE: Norm Ornstein of the AEI talks about the dysfunction of Congress.  While he doesn't say it's all the GOP's fault, you can't help but see that some of the trends are institutional (decline of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats), much of the current dysfunction is the plan of the GOP.

UPDATE 2:  This is really good.