Why The Bush Tax Cut Vote Was So Important (TPM)

[kentuck]

Last edited Sat Jul 28, 2012, 06:04 AM - Edit history (1)

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/07/why_the_tax_vote_matters.php?ref=fpblg

<snip>
In hindsight, an inability or unwillingness to phase out the Bush tax cuts for high earners before the 2010 election was the Democrats’ single largest failure of President Obama’s first two years. That single omission underlies so many of the difficulties he’s faced in the ensuing year and a half that it’s difficult to fathom how different the political landscape would look today if Dems had handled things differently in 2009 or 2010.

But they didn’t do it in the brief period when they had 60 votes. They didn’t do it via the budget process, which would’ve required rounding up only 50 votes, and they were so scared of every GOP utterance by the fall of 2010 that they didn’t even effectively turn GOP hostage-taking into an effective political weapon. Senate Democrats fractured over whether to set the expiration threshold at $250,000 or $1 million, and even at that higher bar they weren’t able to unite in a way that clarified the Republican’s politically noxious legislative strategy. House Democrats were in even greater disarray. It was a mess.

<snip>
I think that’s almost entirely attributable to a commitment to purpose among Democratic leaders that just wasn’t there two years ago. The White House deserves a lot of credit for that — for stepping up a month ago and yanking Congressional Dems out of the politically palatable but substantively lazy consensus that they should draw the expiration line at $1 million. Once that was done, Harry Reid and other Dem leaders made clear, both publicly and privately, that politics and leverage were on the Democrats’ side in this fight, and that political consequences of rebuffing the President would be devastating.

Toward that end, Harry Reid stared down Mitch McConnell in a way he just didn’t try in 2010. McConnell voluntarily dropped a filibuster, ostensibly to prevent Democrats from dragging the fight out for months and months, and identifying Senate Republicans as the key antagonists. He hung that anvil around John Boehner’s neck instead.

....more

[HiPointDem]

1. kr.

[cthulu2016]

2. 2009 is not 2012

I agree with some things said here, but I would have voted one way in 2009 and the other way in 2012 for purely macroeconomic reasons having nothing to do with backbone or strategy or "commitment to purpose"