Meet Tom Tomorrow's "MiddleMan," who may never understand why the famous "enthusiasm gap" just keeps growing

[You know the drill: Click to enlarge.]

"Recovery begins with realism, and there is nothing to be gained by kidding ourselves. On the topics that I know most about, the administration is beyond being a disappointment. It’s beyond inept, unprepared, weak, and ineffective."

-- James K. Galbraith, in a speech at the Post-Election
Conference of Americans for Democratic Action's Education
Fund, at Harvard's Kennedy School, November 20

by Ken

Well, here we are again with all the messes left for the dying hours of the 111th Congress being poked at. The chiefest mess, of course, is what to do about the expiring Bush tax cuts.
as Digby explained to us, with groundwork laid by Profs. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book Off Center: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy, was a complex trap laid by Republican strategizers to play out in a series of "Heads we win, tails you lose" strategic moves, after the administration missed the one chance it had to take control of the issue at the height of its powers early in 2009.

People who do not get that the Republicans planned this --- and are thrilled to keep it going for another two years --- are failing to understand the political reality.

But more depressing than anything, the Democrats are now actively doing their dirty work for them and are on the verge of doing the same thing with the payroll tax. . . .

Once that window shut, thanks to the deadly combination of the economic meltdown left behind by the Bush regime and the inept Rahmist political maneuvering of the new administration, it was essentially beyond the administration's power to steer the fate of the sunsetted tax cuts to a more sensible outcome -- more sensible humanly, economically, and politically. What has been consistently astonishing is the political obtuseness of the Rahmists, who have seemed utterly clueless about how their "canny" political strategizing has been playing out in the real world outside the Beltway. When you get right down to it, about the only political strategy they have is jumping ugly on everyone to the left of their well-right-of-center cave.

Worse still, from their standpoint, though they give no sign of having noticed, is that the corporate masters they've served so faithfully, who were only too happy to accept all the gifts they offered. never for a second contemplated any long-term commitment to their benefactors. And why should they when they can buy pols who really believe in their "cause"? Of course giving away the store, and then some, without getting anything in return has has from the start been the Obama administration's secret negotiating trick.

Why, for example, should the predators of the financial-services industry -- who don't understand that they always need someone to save themselves from their own insatiable greed, and that when they don't get it, we get meltdown -- have to put up with the ever-so-modest limitations put on them by the Dems' compromise reform package when utterly shameless whores like John Boehner and Eric Cantor credibly assure them that they can have anything and everything they want?

I'm less optimistic that the administration strategizers will ever understand that, on the other hand, there really is a political price to be paid for spitting on the people whose earnestness and enthusiasm put Barack Obama in the White House, the people whose hopes and dreams were so powerfully and movingly on display on Inauguration Day. And what have they gotten in exchange for all their enthusiasm and effort? Contempt and abuse. (Hmm, come to think of it, does this behavior not ring a bell? Can you think of anyplace where the corporate stooges of the Obama administration might have picked it up?

And so, while I know I should be keeping track of the hour-by-hour developments in the frantic efforts to salvage the "compromise" tax package, but the sad fact is that we on the outside will have little or no effect on the outcome, which is going to be resolved -- or not -- in a back room somewhere. The overriding factor is that neither Dems nor R's want to risk the wrath of Americans if the tax cuts expire and they discover come January 1 that their paychecks have shrunk. So if they can work out a deal, they will. Of course it's likely to be even worse than the current one.

Whatever reason "Creepy Chucky" Krauthammer may have for making believe that "Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010" ("Swindle of the year"), even he can't really be that stupid, can he? On the other hand, I don't entirely dismiss Gene Robinson's argument that "Democrats have no choice but to accept an irresponsible tax deal." The way the whole thing has been rigged to play out, we may well be in the same position we were in with the final health care "reform" package -- just possibly not doing it is even worse than doing it. Robinson:

As much as I sympathize with the progressives who are ready to man the barricades, let's be real. Killing the deal now would mean a middle-class tax increase, no extended unemployment benefits and no payroll tax holiday. Voters would surely feel they had been robbed - and Democrats, perhaps unfairly, would get the blame.

We knew the White House's response to the impending 2010 electoral disaster was going to be bad. I don't know, though, that we knew it was going to be this bad, with the administration trying to out-neanderthal the neanderthals (cf. "E.P.A. Delays Tougher Rules on Emissions"). Meanwhile, the famous "enthusiasm gap" continues growing.

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