Wait a second, just wait - has Obama pulled a clever move on me here? His budget seems way too ambitious - in flush times it would seem aggressive, but in current malaise seems down right suicidal - and maybe that's it: he has no expectation of most of his proposals to go anywhere, he in fact doesn't want to even get to try, he wants most of it to be gutted by congress - he then gets to look like he tried to be the great progressive his base yearns for, can blame failures on congress and then is free to pursue a rationally moderate course. Is it possible he's that good a Machievellian? It's a thought - remember, he plans on paying for most of this left wing largesse by assuming the economy's gonna grow at a rate absolutely no one is expecting - is it really credible to believe they're that naive?
Now, don't think when you get right down to it he'd play such a risky game of subterfuge - still, not entirely implausible. Remember, Clinton, under much more favourable economic conditions, had a somewhat ambitiously progressive agenda to begin with and after two years was humbled and forced to moderate and still went on to win a landslide victory in '96 - so certainly plausible that Obama is scheming along those lines. Still, my gut feeling is that he sees himself as the hero of a progressive revolution in America, he imagines that future generations of Democrats will lionize him the way Republicans lionize Reagan and that he and his advisers judge the current economic crisis to be a gift horse whose mouth they decidedly have no intention of peering into.
[story in Politico this morning suggests that both my above suggestions are right - they believe the time is ripe to push through a liberal agenda by leveraging a populist backlash against Wall Street and rich people and they think if they don't really get what they want they can just blame it on congress and get credit for trying. Probably lots of potential pitfalls here but biggest one just outlined by business leader on CNBC: the budget will not incentivize private capital to get back in the market, in fact will have exact opposite effect. You may find whoever runs against Obama in 2012 will be borrowing Clinton's famous tagline from 1992: It's the economy, stupid]
