People tend to forget that Ronald Reagan often gave ground on policy substance — most notably, he ended up enacting multiple tax increases. But he never wavered on ideas, never backed down from the position that his ideology was right and his opponents were wrong.
President Obama, by contrast, has consistently tried to reach across the aisle by lending cover to right-wing myths.
Unfortunately, one of those myths is that the Cat Food Commission's work has not been rendered completely irrelevant by the big tax break given to people who didn't need it and who won't use it for anything that will help the rest of us.
The idea is to pre-empt an even more draconian set of budget cuts likely to be proposed by the incoming House Budget Committee chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)
[...]
White House strategists believe this can also give Obama “credit” for getting serious about deficit reduction...
So, in order to "fight" wacko Republican notions that aren't grounded in reality, the President and his people want to preemptively surrender and to simply hand over grandma's Social Security check without so much as a whimper so that they can gain "credit" (Republicans will continue to call him a Socialist in any event) for "solving" something that never was a problem to begin with.
Yeah...gee, what could possibly go wrong with a plan like that?
Update: Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake agrees that our President doesn't appear to know very much about negotiating strategy.
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