"Swinging for the Fences": The Major League Moment In American Politics

By David Sirota

If there's one thing you can say with absolute certainty about Barack Obama as a politician, it is that he learns - and then improvises, adapts and overcomes, as Clint Eastwood rasps in Heartbreak Ridge. There is no better example of his agility than his first budget.

In pushing the stimulus legislation, Obama initially opted to prioritize his campaign promises of "bipartisanship" over some of his promises of progressive policy. The end result was Republican stonewalling and a bill whose substance and public approval was (while still solid) unnecessarily weakened.

The budget is exactly the opposite. Having learned that Republicans aren't interested in bipartisanship, and - more importantly - having grasped that he must start any legislative negotiation from a position of strength, he sent Congress a budget that is unabashedly progressive - and packaged in overtly populist, "I work for Americans not lobbyists" rhetoric.

The substance is far bolder than most imagined - among other things, it includes more than half a trillion dollars for universal health care and it frontally assaults Reaganomics with proposals to increase taxes on the super-rich, hedge fund managers and polluters.

These are radical proposals, not in the sense that they are outside the mainstream of American public opinion (they aren't), but in how different they are from the last 30 years of conservative and conservative leaning government. And such welcome radicalism most likely emerged not because Obama had a secret pony plan to be this bold all along, but because economic turbulence mandates more far-reaching steps; progressive pressure is more vigorous than it has been in years; and Republican obstructionism taught the president the necessity of laying down clear markers from the beginning of any legislative debate (ie. you don't start a negotiation by asking for what you ultimately expect to get, you start a negotiation by asking for far more than you expect to get, knowing that you may be forced to bargain down).

Yes, the budget has some bad "business as usual" ideas in it, including more increases in defense spending, and what amounts to a second $700 billion bank bailout. But on the whole, Republican Sen. John Thune (SD) is (gasp!) actually right: the administration is "really swinging for the fences" on progressive policy.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009031002/swinging-fences-major-league-moment-american-politics