Stopping Obama's Next Betrayal

[Clancy]

The following excerpt is from;

Stopping Obama's Next Betrayal
by Mark Engler
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/04-3


Progressives felt hugely let down last December when President Obama caved on extending the Bush tax cuts. And they almost uniformly feel betrayed now...

Some argue that we should not be surprised that Obama has crafted the compromises he has. Rather than assuming he’s a poor negotiator whose blundering is undermining progressive outcomes, they contend, we’re better off recognizing that Obama isn’t actually seeking progressive outcomes. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a leading advocate of this position, argued in April:

I read all of these laments from liberal pundits that Obama isn’t pursuing the right negotiating tactics, that he’s not being as shrewd as he should be. He’s pursuing exactly the right negotiating tactics and is being extremely shrewd—he just doesn’t want the same results that these liberal pundits want and which they like to imagine the President wants, too. He’s not trying to prevent budget cuts or entitlement reforms; he wants exactly those things because of how politically beneficial they are to him—to say nothing of whether he agrees with them on the merits.

Greenwald added to his position this week by countering the idea that Obama was “forced into” the current debt deal “by the Tea Party hostage-takers”:

For those who believe this narrative, please confront the evidence there; how anyone can claim in the face of all that evidence that the President was “forced” into making these cuts—as opposed to having eagerly sought them—is mystifying indeed. And, as I set forth there, there were ample steps he could have taken had he actually wanted leverage against the GOP; the very idea that negotiating steps so obvious to every progressive pundit somehow eluded the President and his vast army of advisers is absurd on its face.