Obama and tax "compromise"

Just now the President made a rather interesting speech about compromise w/r/t personal taxes. What was interesting was that there was already a very clear compromise and the one that he decided to agree to gave away far more than he needed to.

The politics of the thing are that, for whatever reason, the democrats don't have the votes to limit keeping the tax cuts in place (i.e., not raising taxes for those of us not caught in spin) to the "middle class," which evidently consists of 98% of the country. I get the 98% figure from the fact that this whole debate has to do with maintaining tax cuts for 2% of the country.

What just happened is that 2% of the country held 98% of the country hostage. There wasn't even a 50/50 split - 2% won about 70% of the concessions.

What's odd is that a Democrat, someone who ran on a platform of change and commitment to average people just did this. It is odd, and it isn't odd. I've no doubt that he's reading the climate in Washington and making some sort of decision based on that, but it is very very strange for him to attempt to claim that he should not engage in actual compromise and back-and-forth because then people would have more taken out of their paychecks in two weeks than before. That is true, but when we're talking about an average of 3,000 over a year for this average middle class family, it's not really very much money. On the other hand, the amount the 2% will be retaining IS a lot of money.

The genuinely difficult part came with the claim that two years hence, we will have to make serious cutbacks and talk maturely about the future of the nation. It seems that one could easily have done that now, simply by engaging in a compromise that may have cost him more in terms of short-term political soundbites, but would have been the right thing to do. Moreover, if he had let this simmer for a little, constituents would have gotten a balanced compromise. We do have a democracy and while representatives may feel free to vote for their own interests when they don't hear the voices of their constituents, subjecting this to public debate and media coverage would have resulted in more than enough political pressure.

But maybe this ignorance of the power of public sentiment is consistent with the belief that 2% of the country is the equivalent of 98% of the country. Perhaps most of us just don't count.