Lawrence O'Donnell, who is among other things the best-dressed man on TV, had a segment on Thursday that was both a withering deconstruction/evisceration of a front page New York Times story announcing that Sarah Palin was showing signs of a presidential run, and the funniest five minutes I've seen on television all year. I was laughing out loud through the whole thing. Probably not everyone's reaction but check it out.
Later on Rachel, Chris Hayes was trying to get us to remember way back to--what was it now--April--when the GOPer House voted to pass the Paul Ryan budget, with its plan to kill Medicare and pretty much kill Medicaid. The fallout has been so deadly for the GOP that it's turned into a "what were they thinking?" moment. Apart from the predictable GOPer overreach (predicted here among other places), there was, Chris Hayes reminded viewers, a different political context. The GOPers were still on a roll from winning control in November, they felt they had a mandate and their deficit mantra seemed to have caught on. The Democrats were still on the defensive, and the GOPers had forced concessions of $35 billion on the budget so that the federal government wouldn't shut down. The Paul Ryan budget was the next step.
To Hayes' analysis, I'll add one detail and one of the biggest factors he didn't spell out. The detail was April 15--there was a frenzy to pass the Ryan budget-cutting, no new taxes budget by tax day for its symbolic value. The big factor was that President Obama had once again lulled the GOPers into believing their own propaganda--that he was weak, indecisive and in over his head. He kept out of the budget negotiations, and applauded the outcome, seeming to the GOPers to be capitulating. They thought they had him on the run.
But Obama's pushback was already in the works. He had waited until the danger of government shutdown had passed, and then was ready to go on the offensive with his (and Democrats') priorities. The GOPers gave him a timely gift--the Paul Ryan budget--which he used to such devastating effect in his April speech in which, among other things, he identified the Ryan plan as "ending Medicare as we know it." And the Dems have been on the offensive ever since, thanks to public support of Medicare that is now the conventional wisdom. Recall that Obama's speech was not received well everywhere in the media, still under the GOPer mendacious "budget-cutting" spell. But it was the turning point.
Now two problems remain in the immediate future: the need to raise the national debt ceiling, and the need for Dems to keep in control of the Medicare message by keeping it simple: we're for it, they're against it. At the end of last week, Senate GOPer leader Mitch McConnell linked the problems by announcing that he wouldn't vote to raise the debt ceiling unless there was a deal to cut Medicare spending.
Will the Dems see the need to keep the issue clear? Will the need to slow the growth of health care costs and further reform elements of Medicare trump this, and will GOPers then be able to muddy the waters for the next elections? The statement from Harry Reid's office (appended at the end of the TPM McConnell report linked above) suggests clarity remains, but Reid himself is less than articulate on this matter. There are reports that the Biden group has identified a trillion bucks in cuts, and they may include entitlements. I find that a little hard to believe. But all of that is going to supply political drama for the rest of the summer, and if some murky changes to Medicare ensue, right up to November 2012.
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