As President Obama reaches out to progressive activists to get their temperature on budget compromises, Politico reports that the Democratic Party may have an even more difficult time unifying their members around a deal than the GOP:
Yet getting a deal that raises tax rates for the wealthy may not be so easy for the party, and not just because of inevitable GOP resistance.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will have to find 60 votes to extend just the middle-income tax rates — far from a given when a swath of the Senate’s moderate Democrats are up for reelection in 2014.
Reid and the White House will also need to navigate a hardening Democratic divide on entitlements. Progressives don’t want any deep cuts that Republicans will insist on for a deal. But a Third Way poll of 800 Obama voters set for release Tuesday found that efforts to fix Medicare and Social Security enjoy broader support than liberals suggest.
Even if Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) were to risk his job by backing a tax-rate increase, there are Democrats who think a $250,000 income threshold is too low. So finding 218 House members to pass a bill that would extend the lower tax brackets isn’t exactly a cakewalk. Want Boehner to raise taxes? Republicans privately say the entitlement changes would have to be unimaginably sweeping.
This may be the best position liberal Democrats will be in for a long time. Not only do they believe they have a tax-raising mandate from the presidential election, they also know that Republicans have a decent chance to take back the Senate in 2014. That could make the more strident among them less willing to compromise. And some liberals, like Paul Krugman, argue that Democrats may have more leverage if they just go over the fiscal cliff, allowing tax rates to rise across the board. On this, they risk overreaching, like they did on health care. As Politico notes, public support for reforming entitlements is higher than liberal Democrats acknowledge, putting Senate Democrats up for reelection (many of them in swing states or Republican-leaning states) at odds with liberal Democrats in the House.
It's not just the Senate dems from red states on the ballot in 2014. n nThe Bush43 tax cuts are his most irresponsible legacy. They should all expire as intended if, as Alan Greenspan said in his blessing at the time, the projected future surpluses as far as the eye could see Oops! disappeared. n nWe are not "moderate Democrats" . n nWe are fiscal conservatives who thought the liberal tax-and-spenders finally understood that we are their majority. To our horror, 2008 became 1967 on steroids, without the underlying economic strength of the USA in 1967. n nLook, people like me have nowhere to go, so we go progressive to conservative until we get worn out from knowing we are the majority being held hostage by two extremes.
I told some of my moderate and independent friends who ended up reluctantly (and quietly) voting for Obama, that these fiscal cliff negotiations were a pure liability for Obama. A lot of the moderates I know have been bamboozled by all the newspeak about a "balanced approach" to deficit and debt reduction that have come to see Obama as a fiscal conservative who wants to reform entitlement and simplify taxes. Truth is Obama has never lead on those issues, doesn't know how, and has only offered vague platititudes on those issues. He had a blueprint, Simpson-Bowles, for balanced reform and he rejected it. And the problems for Obama only get worse because the left has spent the past dozen years with such a monomaniacal obsession with the Bush tax rates that they have neighter consensus nor serious policy proposals on tax reform, entitlement reform or how to reduce the debt and the deficit.
The problem is only further compounded for Obama in that he heads a party that continues to be a patronage party that functions by doling out favors to liberal constituency groups, and Obama, in an effort to win re-election, did no adequately prepare his base for the lean times that are coming. Instead Obama pandered hard and these people understandably want something in exchange for their support.