I love Jonathan Chait’s phrase “the fever swamp of the center”; it really is true that self-identified centrists are sounding crazier and crazier, as they try to reconcile their fanatical devotion to the proposition that both parties are equally at fault with the distressing reality that Obama actually advocates the policies they claim to want. And today’s WaPo editorial on the sequester takes the fever to a new pitch. The editorial admits that Obama is calling for exactly the polices the WaPo wants, while Republicans are off the deep end in refusing to consider any revenue; but the piece is nonetheless written as a criticism of Obama, because
Mr. Obama has presented entitlement reform as something he would do grudgingly, as a favor to the opposition, when he should be explaining to the American people — and to his party — why it is an urgent national need.
Oh, Barack, you’re telling me what I want to hear, but you don’t sound as if you mean it! Is this policy analysis, or a lovers’ quarrel?
Oh, and I can’t help reacting to this:
Interest alone will have risen from $224 billion this year to an astonishing $857 billion 10 years from now, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Is $857 billion really astonishing? The American economy is huge, and interest costs are currently very low, so some perspective might be in order. Let’s look at interest as a percentage of GDP:
So yes, interest payments are projected to rise, which is not great. But even a decade from now, they’re expected to be no higher than they were when Bush the Elder was in the White House — not particularly astonishing in the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.
So it’s all there: hyperventilating about the deficit, together with an absolute determination to blame both sides equally no matter how unbalanced they really are. And as Chait, Greg Sargent, and others say, this refusal to hold the worse parties accountable is in itself an important source of our political dysfunction.