If You're Constantly Looking Over Your Shoulder

You can't see what's right in front of your damned face:

But they’re [Democrats] sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.

And policy defeats are what will matter. The Obama White House is looking toward the Clinton model. After all, Clinton also suffered a major setback in his first midterm, Clinton also faced down a hardline Republican Congress, Clinton also suffered major policy defeats, and yet Clinton, as the story goes, managed to co-opt the conservative agenda and remake himself into a successful centrist. The Obama administration has even hired many of Clinton’s top aides to help them recapture that late-90s magic.

That story misses something important: Clinton’s success was a function of a roaring economy. The late ‘90s were a boom time like few others -- and not just in America. The unemployment rate was less than 6 percent in 1995, and fell to under 5 percent in 1996. Cutting deficits was the right thing to do at that time. Deficits should be low to nonexistent when the economy is strong, and larger when it is weak. The Obama administration’s economists know that full well. They are, after all, the very people who worked to balance the budget in the 1990s, and who fought to expand the deficit in response to the recession.

Right now, the economy is weak. Giving into austerity will weaken it further, or at least delay recovery for longer. And if Obama does not get a recovery, then he will not be a successful president, no matter how hard he works to claim Boehner’s successes as his own

I have never understood Obama's obsession with filling his administration with Clinton veterans or constantly looking to Clinton's experiences to navigate his own. Sure, history can prove to be a helpful guide, but originality and situational awareness are also pretty fucking valuable traits in politics. History has its limitations, one of the primary of which being context. What worked in the past doesn't always have the same effect today, just as the economic policies of the 90's won't produce the same results in the economy of the 21st century. 

You would think the White House would want the economy looking a whole lot better going into 2012. Their apparent strategy at this point is to do nothing and cede the policy debate to the Republicans and just idly hope that the economy pulls itself up by its bootstraps in the run up to 2012. Unemployment is categorically ignored as are any discussion of economic stimulus. Also absent are any policies of closing the deficit by raising revenue in addition to cuts. The debate over this budget deal (and just wait, the future budget deals to come) have from the very beginning been about how much to cut, and how much Democrats would agree to continually as the GOP raised the bar ever higher. 

I'm not sure what they will say if things still look bleak next year. Granted, both parties seem to have completely forgotten about unemployment anyway, so maybe the fact that the economy is still in the shitter won't be a campaign issue in 2012 since no one in DC is especially bothered by it.