Avlon on Tax Talks: Obama Got Rolled
John Avlon writes in the Daily Beast:
The Conciliator-in-Chief announced a “framework for a bipartisan agreement” on taxes at a hastily assembled White House press conference on Monday night. There were no party leaders to flank him and no signs of celebration. Even the president sounded downbeat. “I have no doubt that everyone will find something in this compromise that they don’t like, ” he said. “In fact, there are things in here that I don’t like.”
The tentative agreement would extend all the Bush tax cuts for two years, while extending unemployment benefits for the next 13 months. In addition, the payroll tax would be slashed as a new stimulus, while new equipment purchases and college-tuition tax credits would be kept in place. In an unexpected concession, the so-called “death tax” would be set at 35% with a $5 million exemption. “In one fell swoop, you have a Democratic president and a Democratic congress ratifying the signature domestic policy accomplishment of the Bush administration,” Taegan Goddard of PoliticalWire.com told the Daily Beast.
The far left greeted the news with the kind of despair usually reserved for Bush-Cheney inaugurations. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders immediately denounced the plan as “an absolute disaster, an insult to the vast majority of the American people.” Commenters at Daily Kos were calling the president “Captain Caveman” while FireDogLake.com offered the headline “President Bush Obama, GOP Agree: Bail Out the Rich, Destroy Democratic Party.”
By point of conservative comparison, over at RedState.com, the headline read “Obama Retreats on Tax Hike. We Won.”
There is one point of growing agreement between the left and right: this president is a lousy poker player, with no love for the tough-minded gamesmanship of high-stakes negotiations. He believes in reasoning together, even with unreasonable people. This honorable approach leaves him liable to get rolled.
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