Anatomy of a failed leader: how Obama lost everything

The debt ceiling deal that was thrashed out in Washington overnight is, in the popular perception, widely perceived to have averted a cataclysmic default by the US of its debt obligations. In the days leading up to the agreement, President Barack Obama was repeatedly hustling Congressional leaders to do the right thing and vote to lift the debt ceiling.

Yet, today, far from being given credit for his centrist role in averting disaster, Obama is being pilloried by leaders in his own party and by the same progressive liberals who celebrated his victory in 2008 as a chance to change the course of US politics away from the right-wing conservatism of the George W Bush years.

“The deal… is a disaster… for President Obama and his party,” writes Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

[caption id=“attachment_51614” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“President Barack Obama speaks about a debt deal at the White House on Sunday night in Washington. Obama announced that leaders of both parties in the House and Senate have reached an agreement with him to raise the government’s debt ceiling. Philip Scott Andrews/The New York Times”]  [/caption]

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The terms of the deal, he notes, amount to an “abject surrender on the part of the president.” For one thing, Obama did not push the Republican right-wing harder to agree to tax reforms to get the wealthiest Americans, who gave themselves deficit-enhancing tax breaks during the Bush years (which were extended last year by Obama), to share the burden of easing the debt burden by paying higher taxes.

Instead, the deal provides for big spending cuts, especially on social security benefits, at a time when the US economy is anaemic: it effectively shifts the debt burden entirely on to the poor and the wretched of America, whom Obama had sworn to protect from the fat-cats plunderers.

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Additionally, if there is no bipartisan agreement on further measures to lower the deficit - by either increasing taxes on the rich or by cutting back on defence expenditure - there will be larger spending cuts on social security entitlements.

In other words, America’s wealthy fat cats, whose financial interests are well protected by right-wing Republicans and Tea Party activists, will continue to get away - as they did under the George W. Bush years - with tax breaks even when the debt burden needs to be slashed.

But poor and middle-class Americans, who were stuck with the bill for the bailout of Wall Street banks in 2008, will now see their entitlements cut back harshly.

Republicans, says Krugman, are sure to be emboldened by the way Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. “He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling.”

In opinion polls, Obama’s approval ratings have slumped alarmingly. And although Obama is personally liked, voters are increasingly judging his presidency a failure anyway, notes columnist Ross Douthat.

When he was elected President in 2008, Obama had established himself as a thoughtful, articulate leader who had the formidable capacity to overcome political odds and the courage of convictions to tilt the political balance away from the then-discredited far right.

But by capitulating without a fightto the fundamentalism of the far right and by letting down the same liberal constituency that was counting on him to protect their interests, Obama has shown up the limitations of his leadership.

It takes colossal political ineptitude to squander the kind of political goodwill that he had and to become, as he has, the president who has lost everything - even his reputation as a man who stands up for his beliefs.