Obama Talks About Keeping It Real

The surest sign of an actual compromise? No one walks away happy. At least that’s the point the White House is pushing to sell the latest deal on tax cuts for high earners. Under the deal, the so-called Bush tax cuts, set to expire next month, would be extended for two years. In exchange, Republicans would green-light an extension of unemployment benefits that Democrats desperately needed votes to pass. Everyone wins a little something.

Yet, no one in Washington is actually happy. Republicans are the biggest victors, having turned minorities in both the House and Senate into a political victory. But many senior GOP leaders had advocated making the high-end tax cuts permanent. Democrats who resisted efforts to extend the cuts beyond the middle class feel abandoned by their leader. The White House used an impromptu press conference Tuesday afternoon to speak directly to those disgruntled Democrats. Look, Obama told them, many of you wanted a protracted political fight. If it weren’t people’s lives at stake, feeding their families and looking for jobs, I would be much more inclined to fight.

Fair enough. But did Obama capitulate? Any way you look at it, yes, he did. After vowing to stand up to Republican demands, Obama caved to them, and appeared to show little remorse. To explain why, he used an analogy. “I’ve said before that I felt that the middle-class tax cuts were being held hostage to the high-end tax cuts.  I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the hostage gets harmed.”

Still, Obama had to confront the issue of principles. Did he have any left, someone asked? What were his remaining lines in the sand?

A defiant and passionate Obama—who reminded many reporters of the candidate on the campaign trail—launched into a dramatic monologue. “This notion that somehow we are willing to compromise too much reminds me of the debate that we had during health care,” he said. "This is the public option debate all over again. So I pass a signature piece of legislation where we finally get health care for all Americans, something that Democrats had been fighting for for a hundred years, but because there was a provision in there that they didn’t get that would have affected maybe a couple of million people, even though we got health insurance for 30 million people and the potential for lower premiums for 100 million people, that somehow was a sign of weakness and compromise.”

“Now,” he went on, “if that’s the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then let’s face it, we will never get anything done. That can’t be the measure of how we think about our public service. So my job is to make sure that we have a North Star out there.  What is helping the American people live out their lives?  What is giving them more opportunity?  What is growing the economy?  What is making us more competitive?  And at any given juncture, there are going to be times where my preferred option, what I am absolutely positive is right, I can’t get done.”

That said, he issued a challenge. “Take a tally,” he told fellow Democrats. “Look at what I promised during the campaign. There’s not a single thing that I’ve said that I would do that I have not either done or tried to do. And if I haven’t gotten it done yet, I’m still trying to do it.”