Obama is locked in as a defender of social insurance and working Americans, the author writes. Obama's class act

President Barack Obama has backed into a salutary politics of class. I keep thinking of Winston Churchill’s line: You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.

How he got there was infuriating.


All it took was the liberal base kicking and screaming for months about Obama’s self-annihilating effort to sacrifice Social Security and Medicare as part of a (mostly Republican) grand bargain,; his numbers going to hell and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) being too foolish (or unable) to cut a deal when Obama wanted to give away the store.

There’s nothing wrong with class politics when you are speaking for 90 percent of Americans and it emerges that Republicans are defending the privileges of the top 10 percent — at the expense of the 90.

Now Obama is locked in as a defender of social insurance and working Americans. He is finally using his bully pulpit to compel Americans to come to terms with three realities:

First, the vast majority of people are hurting in this prolonged slump, while the very wealthiest are somehow immune.

Second, most Americans, when reminded that government is the provider of Social Security and Medicare, remember that they appreciate those programs and, by extension, appreciate government — and Democrats.

Third, smoking out Republicans, who are on the unpopular side of these issues, is smart politics. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, take note.

The conventional wisdom has been there were serious limits on the ability of a 21st-century president to use his bully pulpit the way both Roosevelts — Teddy and Franklin D. — and Harry Truman did. After all, this is the age of Fox News, social networking, etc. A president has a harder time breaking through the white noise.

Well, guess what? Presidents still set agendas. When Obama makes a speech — like his remarks Monday in the Rose Garden — it makes waves. Look at conversations on talk shows and around kitchen tables.

Is Obama preaching “class warfare”? Hasn’t there been class warfare all along, with shooting from the top down?

Should the filthy rich — excuse me, the most fortunate among us — be paying lower tax rates than those who attend them?

Should Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security be slashed to spare “job creators” — spare me — from having to pay taxes on outlandish profits? And, by the way, the richest of the rich are those on Wall Street. Last time I looked, they were more responsible for wrecking the rest of the economy than for creating jobs. Job creators, indeed.

The more these issues are smoked out, and argued about, the more lame the Republicans look. It’s a losing politics to defend the very rich when billionaire Warren Buffett is saying they should at least pay the same tax rate as their secretaries.

Obama’s poll-obsessed handlers should watch the numbers move — in his direction — as these issues get hashed out and voters conclude that yes, the rich should pay their fair share, and no, we don’t want to cut Social Security and Medicare to spare gazillionaires a few bucks.

The pundits were having a little trouble, post-speech, digesting its significance. We have been told relentlessly to avoid a politics of class.

“I’m a sap,” David Brooks wrote in The New York Times. “I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed the country.”

Well, excuse me. What polarized the country? It surely wasn’t Obama’s refusal to go, say, 90 percent of the way to the Republican position. If GOP leaders had compromised even a little during the debt ceiling fight, when a more conciliatory Obama was willing to toss Social Security and Medicare into the fire, they could have had a deal on terms that blurred differences and hurt Democrats.

The big questions now are: Why did it take Obama so long to realize that the politics of rolling over was a losing strategy? How much damage was done? Will he stick with this course? And will it help his reelection prospects?

Why did he stick with that losing course? Right up until the latest poll numbers, Obama’s personal instincts as a conciliator fatally interacted with the center-right penchants of his top economic advisers. These worthies — Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew, economic advisers Gene Sperling and Jason Furman — fervently argued that cutting Social Security and Medicare was fiscally necessary and that deficit reduction, above all, would appeal to political independents.

But Obama has been talking deficit reduction since before the Bowles-Simpson commission — and his support among independents (and everyone else) kept faltering. Voters obviously cared a lot more about the real economy.

How much damage has been done? Plenty. If Obama had talked this way in the summer and fall of 2010, instead of embracing a politics of class only as a last resort, Democrats might have been spared a lot of midterm congressional losses.

Will Obama stick to this course and can it make a positive difference? Yes, and yes.

It could focus a spotlight on the fact that today’s Republicans don’t represent the pocketbook interests of most Americans. Even Obama’s handlers might realize it’s smart politics.

The only problem is that the toxic fruits of Obama’s earlier stage are still on the table. His earlier deficit-hawk self is now stuck with the need to come up with bushels of money, some through program cuts.

Though his tough talk Monday emphasized that he would not sacrifice Medicare to preserve the tax privileges of millionaires, the fine print of the proposal makes clear that the proposed $320 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts over 10 years can, in fact, lead to reductions in payments to home care, nursing homes and state programs for people with low income and a raise in co-payments.

Still, this is a president who is at last demonstrating why the Republican worldview does not speak for most Americans — and who can be reelected on the merits. It took far too long, but we should be grateful.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His latest book is “A Presidency in Peril.”