The 800 lb. Gorilla in the Room that Obama can't Admit
Sen. Obama has been tracking to the center ever since he got the nomination as the Democratic candidate for President. And while that gives many on the left side of the party considerable heartburn, it has been the correct move because it appeals to independents and moderate Republicans, and, accordingly, expands the pool of voters he needs to win the election.
Liberals, including me, always get heartburn every time we are asked to sacrifice part of our sacred ideology by answering the dirty and messy question: "Do we want to be self-righteous and lose; or do we want to compromise and win?"
As Obama has tacked closer to the center his poll numbers have risen. One answer to the now commonplace question, "Why is he not winning by an even larger spread than he has?" is that he has very gradually tacked to the center and, with each step, picked up a point here and a point there, leading to his now almost double digit lead in both national and state polls.
One side effect of this new "centerist" position is the sacrifice of a truth that he may or may not know, an 800 pound gorilla of truth that he will have to acknowledge and explain to the public, but only after he is elected: we are going to have to spend our way out of the recession.
And that means that we are not going to be balancing the budget in the first term, and maybe not even in the second term. Yet Obama insists that every dime of his almost one trillion dollar spending program will be paid for by specific cuts in expenses elsewhere: Iraq, cutting some fat out of government programs and increasing the tax on the wealthy, etc.
The truth, however, is that all those allegedly "offsetting" cuts take a lot of time to enact, or implement, and will have to be phased in over several years. But, a significant amount of the spending has to be immediate if we are to shorten the current recession to only a couple of years. The spending has to create jobs now, as well as down the road several years.
The irony, of course, is that we have to spend in order to set up the national economic health that will generate the revenues to save in the future.
I am not faulting Obama for ignoring this gorilla in the room until after the election. In fact, I have no idea whether or not he even sees the gorilla. He should, but he may not. What I am strongly recommending is that we don't act as if we are naively unaware that the first several years of the new administration will actually, and necessarily, increase the deficit.
I wish we lived in a world where a candidate could just level to the electorate, and we, the voters, would be smart enough to understand the tough trade offs that lie ahead. In this case: that we have to spend our way out of this recession. But the political truth is that were Obama to admit that now, McCain and Palin would jump on that and promise not only no new taxes but argue that it is insane to increase spending at this time. And they would win in a landslide. It doesn't matter one whit that they would be lying and would not be able to balance the budget either.
So, the bottom line is that the gorilla is real and necessary, but will remain invisible for the next ten days or so.
Monte
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