The Grand Bargain…Isn’t.

“A simple historical fact: There is no political payoff for Democrats in presiding over governmental austerity. The evidence goes far back to long before Bill Clinton.” Historian Rick Perlstein explains what should be obvious to every Democrat worthy of the party name: America didn’t vote for a Grand Bargain. “Barack Obama didn’t win by promising a grand bargain…He won despite it. Democrats won’t win in the future by ‘reforming’ entitlements. If they do it, they will lose, precisely because of it, and possibly for generations. If he believes things to be otherwise, God help the party of Jefferson and Jackson.”

Along the same lines, Paul Krugman explains why no bargain is a better option than a bad deal. “Mr. Obama essentially surrendered in the face of similar tactics at the end of 2010, extending low taxes on the rich for two more years. He made significant concessions again in 2011, when Republicans threatened to create financial chaos by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And the current potential crisis is the legacy of those past concessions. Well, this has to stop — unless we want hostage-taking, the threat of making the nation ungovernable, to become a standard part of our political process.“

So, is the president listening? Well…er…the jury’s out. Right now, White House spokespersons are emphasizing Obama’s flexibility and the president himself has said that we have to “continue to take a serious look at how we reform our entitlements.” Which is horseshit, quite frankly, because, as Galbraith pointed out in 2010, the Very Scary Deficit Projections everyone’s using to keep this slash-Social-Security-and-Medicare train hurtling along are, in a word, bunk.

In the meantime, the 2011 iteration of the Grand Bargain has leaked, and it’s as terribad as you might imagine.