CAN YOU WOBBLE IF YOU DON'T STAND FOR ANYTHING?

Obama Wimps Out on Tax Cuts (Eric Alterman, 11/16/10, Daily Beast)

It’s happening again. Barack Obama is punching the Republicans in the fist with his face. Almost in spite of themselves, Democrats won the public-opinion battle over extending the Bush tax cuts for Americans making a quarter of a million a year or more with strong majorities supporting their position. They did not have the nerve to hold this vote before the election, and now the nervous nellies appear to be getting ready to throw in the towel (or at least most of it).

Obama's First Post-Election Crisis: Will He Go Wobbly on Tax Cuts? (Walter Shapiro, 11/16/10, Politicvs Daily)

With the 2001 Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire at the end of this year, Obama still theoretically wants to return the tax rates for upper-income Americans (families earning more than $250,000 a year) to what they were under Bill Clinton. The revenue at stake is significant even by Washington's profligate standards – a projected $700 billion over 10 years. But confronted with the insistence by resurgent Republicans that all the Bush tax cuts be enshrined for eternity, Obama has gone wobbly in the face of the GOP's fuzzy math about the deficit. [...]

More than anything, the tax-cut fight will provide an early referendum on how Barack Obama intends to govern during the next two years.

Will the president emulate Ronald Reagan's resolution to stay the course after the GOP's 1982 electoral setback – and only reluctantly yield ideological ground to congressional Republicans? Will Obama take as his model a triangulating Bill Clinton who outfoxed Newt Gingrich during the 1995 governmental shutdown yet also signed the Republican-backed welfare reform bill? Based on early post-election indications, Obama seems inclined to follow a third way of drift devoid of either Reagan's determination or Clinton's moxie.

Obama Supporters Looking for a Sign in Tax Cuts Brawl (David Corn, 11/17/10, Politics Daily)

The other day I had lunch with a fellow active in Democratic fundraising, and he told me about a multimillionaire (nearly a billionaire) who was once a big backer of Obama. Now this mega-money man says, no more. Why? I asked. Obama, my lunchmate replied, doesn't have a spine. And when I was in California this past weekend, several Obama supporters I encountered also expressed intense frustration with the president, each asking a version of the question, when is he going to start fighting?

Just look where listening to billionaires and the Beltway got Democrats.....

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 17, 2010 6:31 AM