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Obama's Bipartisan Fetish Bait for Social Security Cuts

1,001 views · Published 16 March 2011 · 11:13 · Indexed 31 October 2026

Channel: The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder · 2011 · News & Politics

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You can always count on Jonathan Chait to play the Beltway bipartisan fetish card:

There's a benefit in bashing Republicans for going after Social Security. But that assumes they do go after Social Security, which, despite all their rhetoric, is far from certain. I'd argue that, politically speaking, obtaining a bipartisan deal on the deficit is likely to be popular. While the specifics of cutting entitlements are extremely unpopular, the general meta-message of bipartisan cooperation is highly popular. And people tend to follow the broad heuristics of whether the parties are getting along rather than the specifics, which is why the health care law, whose policies were mostly very popular, was so unpopular.

Americans do like some bipartisan agreements, but not when it comes to cutting entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. It would be political suicide for President Obama to agree to any type of cuts because of some 'can't we all just get along" idiocy, and his base will not forget it. Americans will not stand for it either.

Let's be clear about something else that Geithner doesn't understand: Republicans who support cutting benefits for the Working Joe will never give Obama any credit for doing the wrong thing either.

The partisan breakdown of the results shows that Republicans, Democrats and independents agree that cutting Social Security is the least acceptable option of the three presented in the poll. It came in third among all respondents who made a choice. 

via http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/white-house-debates-what-do-social-secu

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