From Salon: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/its_almost_like_the_tea_party_won/
The election was a rebuke of austerity — but the hard right is getting its way on the sequester
By Steve Kornacki
Wednesday, Mar 6, 2013
The Obama administration is doing its best to make Americans aware of – and enraged by – the impact of the sequester, hoping to pressure Republicans into a deal that will undo the cuts and replace them with the “balanced” deficit reduction framework that the president has been seeking for two years now. But several days into the sequester, it’s starting to feel like the critical mass of outrage that the White House is hoping for may not be reached.
This doesn’t mean the sequester won’t have a real impact. The domestic spending cuts will force agencies that provide aid to the poor to turn away families that need it, and the combined effects of slashing $85 billion from Defense and domestic programs over the next seven months will slow an economy that’s still struggling to return to health.
But how will this look to the average voter? The poor, who will feel the brunt of the cuts most acutely, don’t have all that much visibility in or influence on the national political debate. And if GDP growth is now weaker than it would otherwise be, the impact will be felt indirectly by people; that is, if the store at the end of the street is still closed down six months from now, will the average voter blame the sequester, or just chalk it up to the generally rotten economy we’ve all been living with since 2008?
In the run-up to sequestration, there was some talk that the cuts would be short-lived, with another manufactured deadline – the expiration of the continuing resolution that funds the government – looming on March 27. Obama, this thinking went, would have the upper hand in negotiating a new CR, with Republicans feeling the public’s wrath over the sequester and suddenly receptive to undoing it. But so far, public opinion has actually trended in the GOP’s favor. Before sequestration went into effect last Friday, polling indicated that voters would be much more likely to blame Republicans than Obama. But a new CBS survey this week finds the public assigning blame almost evenly.
Public opinion could change, obviously, and there remain plenty of Republican lawmakers who are vehemently opposed to cutting the Defense budget. But within the GOP, the great revelation of the sequester has been how powerless the Pentagon defenders have been – and how popular the Tea Party vision of a radically scaled back government, Department of Defense included, has become. Add in the GOP’s absolute resistance to any further revenue increases in the wake of January’s fiscal cliff deal and you can see why House Speaker John Boehner ended up concluding that the sequester was the most palatable option on the table. It’s not like any deal he could have struck with the White House would have had a chance of passing muster with his fellow Republicans.
Continue reading at: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/its_almost_like_the_tea_party_won/
