In case you think that Friday's 2011 budget victory was small, remember that in politics as in war, the goal is to demoralize your enemy so that he no longer has the will to fight.
Then read Eugene Robinson in a high dudgeon of tactical despair, consider that a Princeton professor of history and public affairs now writes this, note that the not-at-all conservative Politico writes this, and read the pugnacious Robert Reich who writes that Republicans remind him of grade school bullies who took his cupcake and that Obama reminds him of himself that day. While you're at it, you could join John Hayward in this bit of metaphorical fun, where he writes
- Dejected Americans moping around the dusty, jobless, inflation-haunted streets of statist America looked up in surprise as Big Government burst from the doors of the Capitol Hill Saloon with a broken nose and rubber knees. A hush fell across the crowd as Boehner followed, rubbing his bruised knuckles. The jingle of his spurs counted off his steps like a stopwatch as he strolled into range for another haymaker.
Our political enemies -- Progressivists who seek to strip this nation of its last vestiges of individual economic liberty by political means -- are in near-total disarray for one reason and one reason only. Their polls tell them what ours tell us: that when it comes to not cutting spending only their leftist base stands with them. They pale before the host of independent voters who now stand arrayed with us.
Now is not the time for faint heart. We must use the current public support for restoration of fiscal sanity to attempt to do just that: we should pass in the House, and seek votes in the Senate on achievable statutory reductions of future spending. These might include a cap on Federal spending of 18% -- or 19% or 20% -- of GDP, medical welfare (Medicaid) reform similar to welfare reform with lifetime individual limits for anything other than critical care, and market-based reforms to payments for hospital and other medical services for the elderly (Medicare Parts A and B) similar to those in the prescription drug benefit (Part D) that put individuals in economic charge of their own health insurance.
To fail to raise the debt limit is to impose an immediate balanced budget requirement: to require that expenditures not exceed tax revenue. Given that 2011 Federal revenue will cover only about 2/3 of appropriated spending -- even after the budget deal -- turmoil is all that would result from the abrupt imposition of a spending reduction of that magnitude. This is unthinkable to most of the electorate, and it is not rational to expect that our sensible political goals can possibly come out of that. However, we can lift the debt ceiling incrementally, a week or two at a time until reasonable and necessary changes get votes in the Senate.
Then, the independents who stand with us now will know that we are serious. Then, furthermore, if the Democrat Progressivists who sit in the Senate and in the White House are unwilling to abandon their European high-spending ways, or if their Red State Democrat colleagues insist on locking arms with them against the nation's best interest, at least those Red State Democrat Senators can be called to account for their actions in 2012. It is difficult to imagine the Awesome O's re-election in that scenario.
