Coalition Maintenance 2

Noam Scheiber:

Barack Obama, Tax Cuts, 2012, And David Axelrod: Inside A Divided White House: By any measure, the first few weeks after the midterms were hardly encouraging. The president gave a low-energy press conference, then jetted off to Asia for ten days; the advisers he left behind seemed rootless and out of sorts.... [T]he White House settled on the contours of a plan: Obama would refocus on reforming government and transcending partisanship—something they felt voters craved. “It was back to the first principles he stood by in the campaign,” says the strategist. This was, among other things, the impetus behind embracing a ban on congressional earmarks and freezing federal pay. Both initiatives raised hackles among congressional Democrats and liberals, and stirred suspicions that Obama was bent on Dick Morris–style triangulation. But the charge is unfair. Obama has a longstanding appetite for good-government initiatives....

[T]he Obama people and even many on the Hill believe the elections have altered this dynamic. “The Republicans for the first time share some responsibility for cleaning up the mess,” says Chris Van Hollen, soon to be the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. It’s one reason, adds the White House–friendly strategist, that “we’re probably in a better position now than if we’d barely held control of the House.” Nowhere is the continuity motif more evident than the president’s midcourse personnel decisions. So far, the White House has replaced its budget director, national security adviser, and Council of Economic Advisers chair with internal candidates.... Other than Larry Summers’s replacement at the National Economic Council, where the administration has hinted at a fresh face, the only real possibility for a high-profile outsider is chief of staff.... Last summer, John Podesta, the Clinton ex-chief of staff who runs the influential Center for American Progress, became alarmed at the lack of pushback against the Bush tax cuts. To goad the administration into action, he organized a debate between Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former adviser to John McCain. Podesta’s gambit was only a partial success. Geithner, who’d previously weighed in on the issue, joined the campaign to bury the upper-income cuts when they expire in January. But, except for one forceful speech in September, the president stayed mostly on the sidelines.

The missteps that led to the likely two-year renewal of the Bush tax cuts highlight the danger in the White House’s aversion to course corrections....

Within the administration, the split over whether to mount a tax-cut offensive broke down largely along wonk-operative lines. The wonks spent the last year mystified that the White House was ducking the fight when the substantive merits were so one-sided. The operatives brooded that the politics could abruptly turn against them, despite polling showing little public appetite for the upper-income cuts. “They view it through the class warfare stuff—Kerry in 2004, Gore in 2000,” says one administration official. “They worry that they’ll get painted as lefties, tax-raisers.” At key moments, including one internal discussion this spring, the political team declined to make a concerted push before Election Day. “The political people were like, ‘It’s a mess, let’s not deal with it now,’ ” says another official involved.... The operatives were rightly put off by the cowardice of Senate Democrats. What they didn’t grasp was the structural advantage of a White House in framing a debate. The West Wing’s reluctance to exploit this advantage was a bitter irony given that polls showed Obama to be highly effective on the tax question as a candidate. “Obama thinks there are campaigns and there’s governing, and never the twain shall meet,” laments one Democratic consultant. Indeed, in his statement on the compromise, Obama seemed to relish a return to the issue in 2012...