Limited, Inc.

Does nobody remember the election of 2010? The GOP did not run on cutting medicare - they ran on restoring the cuts Obama proposed. And running to the left of Obama, they smashed the dems, who had their hands tied behind them by the clueless prez. With the new budger, O. has once again enacted the same strategy. As a political strategy, his idea seems to be that trading the votes  of the Washington Post op ed crew (they will love the cuts to gross entitlements) for the votes of the majority of Americans (who hate the cuts to the entitlements they have earned over a generation of wage stagnation and peculation by Wall Street) is an excellent idea. It isn't that the Dem voters will vote for Republicans - they just wont vote. This is an easy dynamic to see. As a farcical sideshow, this disaster will be accompanied, in the comments sections of liberal blogs, with Dem operatives or Obama fans adopting strident and bullying tones towards those who find the strategy politically pathetic a

I can't really criticize Obama for not sticking to his beliefs. After 2010, you would think that he would have changed his belief that cutting "entitlements" was a good political idea. The GOP ran to the left of Obama in that election, pointing to the cuts he was proposing to Medicaid to rally the troops. Well, Obama is doing it again, proposing a transparent cut in Social security at a time when social security should actually be raised quite a bit. So, we at least have evidence of a core belief, which Obama shared with freedom loving Thatcher and Reagan: government entitlements are the problem. I like how this comes on the heels of the inauguration speech where O. made heavy weather with inequality as a bad thing. He's apparently changed his mind, since his proposals will make it visibly worse. I actually thought the Dems had learned something in 2012, but they didnt. Instead, the same feckless turn to the right is going to be their theme in 2014. Giving the GOP an