The Fiscal Cliff Was a Molehill

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

03 January 13

Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with assistant editor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the end of the “Fiscal Cliff” crisis, Howard Schulz’s bipartisanship fetish, and John Roberts’s latest political play.

n the first hours of the new year, the Senate overwhelmingly approved a not-so-grand bargain to arrest our fall off the “fiscal cliff.” The White House is hailing the deal as a big win. Many liberals, from the Iowa Senator Tom Harkin to our own Jonathan Chait, see it as Obama yet again snatching defeat (or at least partial defeat) from the jaws of victory. What’s your take?

It is discouraging that Obama would retreat on what he had previously vowed to be a nonnegotiable line in the sand – refusing to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for income over $250,000 a year. (That line moved to $400,000 for individuals, $450,000 for couples.) He ran on this inviolate stand and won. It makes you wonder if he will hold to his other ostensibly firm position – refusing to let the nation’s debt ceiling be held hostage in the coming battle over budget cuts, due in March. That said, Obama did stave off cuts to Social Security and Medicare and extended unemployment insurance for a year. But in truth, for all the news-media hysteria over the “fiscal cliff,” the cliff may prove a molehill in the view of history anyway. It’s just another skirmish in an ideological war that promises far bloodier battles ahead.

The House passed the Senate bill late last night after much public bellyaching from the GOP. Only 85 Republicans supported the bill and the party’s leadership was divided, with John Boehner and Paul Ryan voting “yea” and Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy voting “nay.” Is this a one-time split or are we witnessing the crack-up of the current GOP?

There’s no split. Those 85 Republicans in the House who voted for the bill are the outliers; they were outnumbered nearly two-to-one by those Republicans who voted against it. This is still a party of Tea Party ideology, and it has no incentive to change. Thanks to the power of gerrymandering, nearly all GOP House members are in safe seats: Only 15 out of the 234 Republicans elected in 2012 won in districts that voted for Obama. And so they are far more fearful about primary challenges from the right than they are about potential Democratic opposition. And the hard right is already reinforcing discipline for the next round. Charles Krauthammer called the bill “a complete surrender” even though it realized the GOP dream of making most of the Bush tax cuts permanent. Pat Toomey, the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, is now threatening a government shutdown over extending the debt ceiling. Even an ostensibly moderate conservative, David Brooks, wrote a column on the eve of the vote channeling Romney’s disdain for the vast number of mooching Americans who (in his view) expect the welfare state to support them even at the price of destroying the country.

There was a hope among many Democrats that Obama’s reelection would mean the defeat – or at least emasculation – of the Party of No. You’ve consistently said that the American Right isn’t going down anytime soon. Are the next four years going to look any different from the last two?

For the reasons above, No. What’s more, the right thinks long-term, and if you look at the long-term, the whole ugly “fiscal cliff” standoff was a win-win for conservatives, no matter what their passing defeats in this week’s deal. The more Washington looks dysfunctional, the more it sows dissatisfaction with the very idea of a Federal government. Yes, Democrats and the White House can argue that polls show that the Republicans would be getting most of the blame if Congress couldn’t reach agreement on the “fiscal cliff.” But that’s short-term liberal wishful thinking. Long-term, this intractable dispute has undermined Americans’ faith in government, period, and the voters’ plague-on-all-your-houses view of Washington is overall a resounding ideological win for a party that wants to dismantle government, the GOP. The conservative movement is no more dead after its 2012 defeat than it was after the Goldwater debacle of 1964.

via The Fiscal Cliff Was a Molehill.