(Cross posted on my personal blog)
I've read many reactions to the Ryan budget. Since I tend to "hang around" political liberals, the reactions are mostly negative. But his budget actually means something different to me than it does to many others; IMHO Ryan did something right by submitting his budget; seriously.
No, the numbers don't really add up and it is, on policy terms, junk that doesn't have a prayer of passing. But...this says something about what the Republicans do right, politically speaking. More below the fold...
Yes, I agree with Paul Krugman that on substance, the Paul Ryan budget is flim-flam, even if the Very Serious people desperately cling to the notion that he is a "smart conservative".
But I take something else out of this. First, Ryan is reasonably popular in his district and is popular among the Republican base; this budget is "red meat" for them. Next, no "serious" Democrat would submit a budget that was this popular among liberals; that is, no "serious" Democrat with national ambitions would throw out a budge that was "red meat" (ok, granola and tofu? :-) ) to liberals. They'd point out that such a budget would be DOA in the House and/or Senate; it would not survive a filibuster or the objections of "blue dog" Democrats. Hence they would start with a budget that should appeal to moderates and a few conservatives...only to end up moving the goal posts further and further and further to the right until what was left would be indistinguishable from what, say, John Boeher would come up with.
Now, I am NOT as cynical as Mano Singham is:
Is the president a lousy negotiator?
Paul Krugman is a politically savvy man so it surprises me that even he thinks that the reason that the Republicans and the oligarchy are getting their own way so easily on fiscal issues is because Obama is a lousy negotiator.
As I have said over and over again, the Democrats negotiating strategy is to betray the middle and working classes that support them and give the oligarchy as much as they can while acting as if they were forced into it or were outmaneuvered. Since even people like Krugman and other liberal commentators seem to have bought it, it means that they have succeeded.
The Democrats behavior is perfectly understandable if you bear this simple rule in mind: When it comes to any policy that the Democrats say they espouse but which hurts the interests of the oligarchy, the Democrats do not want a strategy that will win, they seek one that will lose.
But I really believe that the Republicans are better negotiators and better politicians than Democrats are. Yeah, they lost the executive branch and the Senate in 2012, but the fact that they held the House and are not relegated to being some mere fringe party geting 10-20 percent of the vote is a testimony to their political abilities. Their ideas are terrible, yet they manage to sell them to a significant percentage of the voting public.