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I realize that watching the fiscal cliff negotiations in Washington has been likened to stylized Kabuki theater more than once by pundits far and wide, but I'm going to push this metaphor for all it is worth today. You might even say I'm going to push it right over a cliff, but that would be a horrendous metaphor mixture indeed.
What's that? Mayans? Not Maya Rudolph? Man, I've got to start paying closer attention to these things. I'm still trying to figure out what sort of omen it is that Paul McCartney performed with Nirvana on 12/12/12, personally. Maybe not the end times, but certainly the strange times.
Well, ask and ye shall receive, at least on one of them. Adding a small transactions tax to speculative financial transactions (0.25 percent is the figure most often suggested) could raise quite a bit of money, it turns out.
Is John Boehner just worried about his leadership position? Is he really putting his own re-election as Speaker of the House before all else?
The news that the Supreme Court will be taking up two important gay marriage cases was expected, but nonetheless created a burst of commentary. But I can't help but wonder if people are getting the cases slightly backwards. In short, I think the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) case is going to prove to be more important than the Proposition 8 case from California.
But the "tax the rich" policies so far being discussed (at least the ones that leak out to the public) are laughably timid and tame, when you really examine the big picture. So far, what is making Republicans howl is President Obama's plan to end the Bush tax cuts on the top two marginal income tax rates, which would raise them from 33 percent to 36 percent, and from 35 to 39.6 percent. Seen one way, that's impressive, since tax rates haven't gone up in such a fashion since President Clinton's first year in office. But seen another, it's not all that radical at all.
Where to begin? Let's see, Obama's job approval polling is not completely through the roof, but it certainly has scraped the ceiling. The Associated Press just released a new poll that has Obama at 57 percent approval, 41 percent disapproval -- a job approval level the president hasn't seen since Osama Bin Laden's death. Added to today's unemployment rate dropping to the lowest point since Obama has held office, and you've got to believe that the folks in the White House have plenty to celebrate this holiday season.
While the entire political punditry world is caught up in yet another horserace -- this time around, the "who's up/who's down on the fiscal cliff talks" debate -- something astounding is happening within the ranks of the Republican Party. Because major tenets of the party's faith seem to be crumbling. The bedrock ideology of the party is revealing itself, in multiple ways, of having been built on sand all along. These are all rather polite ways of calling the Republicans enormous hypocrites, I realize. But when the shoe fits, the shoe fits, so I offer no apologies for doing so.
All in all, a pretty triumphant month for the president, no matter how you look at it.
Before his second term has even begun, are we seeing "Obama 2.0" in action? This is the question swirling around right now in the inside-the-Beltway punditocracy, and it's a refreshing one to contemplate: has President Barack Obama finally learned his lesson that his old method of legislative negotiation simply was not working? Has he, to put it another way, grown some backbone?