What's motivating Obama and the Democrats?

President Obama is once again stirring up the ire of liberals for his handling of the debt ceiling mess. Paul Krugman is calling him "President Pushover," echoing Elizabeth Drew's critique that Obama has decided that ruling like a moderate Republican is the key to winning the independent vote in 2012. That may very well be true. Obama has put up no struggle as Republicans have turned the economic debate from creating jobs to reducing spending. His proposals for resolving the debt embroglio are heavily weighted toward big spending cuts. It does indeed seem crazy, as Krugman writes, for Obama to be pinning his reelection hopes on a set of programs that seem to guarantee continued high unemployment going into the 2012 election while forcing Democrats to share the stain of cutting Medicare with Republicans.

But what explains Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? In their current negotiations with John Boehner they are apparently offering spending cuts in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling with no guaranteed increase in taxes. As David Kurtz says, "Dems to GOP: If we give you everything you want, will you finally raise the debt ceiling?" I don't see how their position is any better than Obama's.

It seems to me there are three possible interpretations. (1) The Democratic Party in general is just as hapless as Obama. They've all bought into the arguments of what Krugman calls the Very Serious People who think that deficit reduction is good for the economy; they are all pushovers before the Republicans' scorched earth tactics. (2) Reid and Pelosi believe that the independent vote is also key to their maintaining / regaining control of their respective houses in 2012. (3) Reid and Pelosi, like Obama, are simply calling the Republicans' bluff. They know the Republicans won't take yes for an answer so their offer of significant spending cuts is so much cheap talk. They also know that they have an ace in the hole - it will require legislation to extend the Bush tax cuts, and without such legislation they're guaranteed big revenue increases.

My money is on (2) or (3). At any rate, all of the criticism of Obama seems misplaced to me. Senate and House leaders have not acquitted themselves any better than Obama since the health care fiasco of 2009-10 and the failure to pass a budget in 2010. Obama's missteps are not the product of his own unique failings - they are either symptomatic of problems in the Democratic Party as a whole, or are actually not missteps at all but shrewd political gamesmanship on the part of all of the major players in the party.