Paul Krugman summarizes the debt ceiling debacle in his Conscience of a Liberal blog post this morning titled, “Obama, Moderate Republican”. He references a piece by Nate Silver that looks at a poll on how each party’s voters want the budget package to be structured. Paul comes to this conclusion:
What Obama has offered — and Republicans have refused to accept — is a deal in which less than 20 percent of the deficit reduction comes from new revenues. This puts him slightly to the right of the average Republican voter.
So we learn two things. First, Obama is extraordinarily eager to make concessions. Second, Republicans are incredibly unwilling to take yes for an answer — something for which progressives should be grateful.
Wait until the American public sees what Obama is putting on the table. It will definitely not be what they thought they were signing up for.
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The Confluence 
[…] Yes, there is one moderate Republican in DC. And he’s a Democrat. And he stepping on the toes of much of what donkeys of the past have held […]
obama can safe usa?
i don’t think so.
If you haven’t read the comments yet, here’s the typical apologist crap I’m coming across:
7.
Nancy
Welllesley MA
July 14th, 2011
9:44 am
I regret that there are so many people, not just Republicans who seem to think is just for fun and games and there are no negative consequences. It’s appalling the level of ignorance and stupidity among politicians and many of their constituents. Obama is just too intelligent for the job
Oh, jeez, hand me the barf bag.
Are we sure she’s not a Republican troll?
Well, we know that the Democratic Party has been inching into Republicanism for some years now. Last night I was glumly realizing that for many years now every (most every) major decision, both foreign and domestic, has been disheartenly bad. Quite a track record for a society.
How does Krugman know what Obama has offered? The GOP house members are complaining that Obama can’t be pinned down — they finish one day of negotiations with some agreement then Obama comes in the next day saying something that throws the previous day’s discussion out.
That doesn’t surprise me one bit since Obama has always been about making large sweeping and VAGUE pronouncements and for details one is told to just go to his website where all your pesky questions will be answered (and they never were).
We can quibble about the numbers but there is no doubt that trillions of dollars in cuts are going to hurt the middle and working classes the hardest. Tim geithner already admitted that life is going to get very hard for us for some time to come. So, it sort of doesn’t matter what the final bottom line is. We already know in advance that Obama is about to screw us.
I blame the people who did nothing or cheered the RBC meeting in may 2008. They gave the Democrats the signal that they would not stand in the way of unethical, unfair, unDemocratic decisions. And now the Democrats in charge are going to do what they want, to hell with the voters.
If the activist base is dismayed now, imagine how bad it was for *us*. We saw in advance what the fallout was going to be but when we sounded the warning signal, they called us racists, bitter knitters and a paranoid bunch of shrieking holdouts.
You gives’em books and gives’em books and all they do is chew on the covers. So much for our activist base. Dumber than a box of rocks.
I guess the term” moderate ” Repug today means GOP but not tea party ….But I would not call him a moderate Repug ….he’s pretty hard line Repug
So we learn two things. First, Obama is extraordinarily eager to make concessions…..
That’s real his job and he’s very good at it….and why would GOP take his 1st, 2nd or 3rd offer? Obama can be counted on to offer ever more
What paper doll just said.
The question is how many actual Democrats remain in Congress? An issue confused by Obama’s skin color; I’ve little doubt but fior his historical historicness, more Dems (the CBC for example) would be opposing him.
Off topic: Happy Bastille Day!
Embedding disabled :evil:, but at least you can click the link and watch it on YT. 🙄
That’s one of my favorite scenes from that movie.
Happy Bastille Day!
But, Professor Krugman, if he’s “to the right of the average Republican voter Republican voter”, how can he be a moderateRepublican?
Doesn’t that really make him a “conservative but not quite batshit-crazy Republican”?
Seriously? It took Krug this long?
They are all dumbfounded. None of them has any idea what to do. They are so far out of it that it is no use eve discussing them. You are not going to cure a bad case of the dums.
I took courses with Alan Greenspan in the early 60’s with the Ayn Rand people. When he recently retired and wrote his auto he praised her for being a mentor to him. Gah! All those years ago and he never saw that she was simply a watered down Nietzsche. Greenspan is not a very smart guy. And he didn’t know what the flaw was in his thinking.
Here’s the flaw he couldn’t see: Rand bases all of it on self-interest. No one would self-destruct what they built up, now would they? It would go against their self interest. Rand herself destroyed NBL lectures because Branden had a secret affair with a young pretty woman and didn’t come clean with her. He didn’t come clean because he knew she would destroy all that he had built for her and himself. So of course when he was outed, that’s exactly what she did. She destroyed it all. Was that in her self interest? Couldn’t Greenspan see that she went against her own self-interest? No. He couldn’t because he was in as much denial as Rand was.
And this dodo ran the financial business of the world for all those years. I am again shaking my head in disbelief. It’s high school all over again.
There is only a smigen of difference between the two parties. Just enough to exaggerate it come campaign time. I’m not sure why you keep expecting anything else. Maybe hoping is a better word. Politics is global along with everything else. There is no representative govt because there are no longer any referents at all. Just “floating” signs.
We are in simulation here. When simulation is total then we are in Virtual Reality. VR is irreversible. No escape, no way out. Dead end. If you keep wasting your energy on the imaginary dialectic you will not even be able to save yourself.
how much difference should there be between the two main parties? Do we want violent swings between two extremes every few years? Just when we are getting used to fascism, suddenly we have to switch back to communism because we just had an election?
I am only half kidding.