Moving Right

I keep hearing that it's the fault of people like me -- people who chose NOT to vote in the past election -- for the GOP resurgence. Yes, the Democrats didn't fulfill their mandate, I'm told, but there is no denying that Democrats aren't as bad as Republicans.

This argument may play well in the press and throughout progressive organizations, but it doesn't seem to play half as well in the Washington beltway. As Matthew Rothschild reports in The Progressive,

Obama has chosen to go where no Republican President has dared to tread: to prepare the public for the slashing of Social Security.

Since day one, he’s been fueling irrational fears about the bankruptcy of Social Security. These fears are unfounded, as Dean Baker has been pointing out for years, most recently in this paper.

No one made Obama impanel this commission on deficit reduction in the first place.

No one made him appoint Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to head it up. Simpson has a long record of hostility toward the social safety net, and Bowles, yet another Clinton retread, is a triangulator from way back.

It’s not a surprise, then, that Simpson and Bowles have come up with some drastic proposals to slash that social safety net.

If those proposals, or anything like them, become law, and you’re on Social Security today, you’ll end up getting less. And if you’re not yet at retirement age, you’ll be working longer before you can get Social Security, and if you manage to live long enough to qualify for Social Security, you’ll be receiving punier benefits than your parents did...

It's good to remember that the first major blow to the social safety net -- the evisceration of "welfare" -- was brought to us, not by some sinister Republican, but by the supposedly liberal Bill Clinton! Democrats en masse helped to insure that NAFTA passed and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were given the green light. And who has dragged their feet the most over the past two years in regards to legislation to combat global warming? President Obama and his Democratic colleagues.

While there is no question that Democrats tend to be more progressive than Republicans on social issues, the line between the two mainstream parties becomes blurred beyond recognition on almost every other type of issue. If Obama and his colleagues end up gutting social security, then the line will be erased completely.