A "deficit peacock," Paul Krugman explains, is defined by the Center for American Progress as distinct from "deficit hawks" in the way they "pretend that our budget problems can be solved with gimmicks like a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending."
Leaving defense spending to one side is bad enough. Shrieking, peacock-style, about spending is something we expect from conservatives out there in their garden, strutting around ineffectually and pooping on everything. Now Obama himself is doing the peacock strut with his freeze proposal. Where did he get this stuff? From John Boehner?
To justify the freeze, Mr. Obama used language that was almost identical to widely ridiculed remarks early last year by John Boehner, the House minority leader. Boehner then: “American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt.” Obama now: “Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.”
What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that Mr. Obama’s advisers believed he could score some political points by doing the deficit-peacock strut. I think they were wrong, that he did himself more harm than good. Either way, however, the fact that anyone thought such a dumb policy idea was politically smart is bad news because it’s an indication of the extent to which we’re failing to come to grips with our economic and fiscal problems.
Don't blame President Obama, Krugman pleads. Blame the political culture in Washington.
But I do blame Obama. It was clear throughout his Senate career that he was carefully learning that culture and how to use it to political advantage. Instead of using that knowledge to manipulate Washington to our advantage, he's beginning to look trapped in the very culture that's destroying the country.
For the time being, anyway, he is sustained largely by those of us who so badly want him to survive and make some serious changes in that very culture. What are the odds that he can pull it off?
If health reform fails, you can forget about any serious effort to rein in rising Medicare costs. And even if it succeeds, many politicians will have learned a hard lesson: you don’t get any credit for doing the fiscally responsible thing. It’s better, for the sake of your career, to just pretend that you’re fiscally responsible — that is, to be a deficit peacock.I’m sorry to say this, but the state of the union — not the speech, but the thing itself — isn’t looking very good.
