Obama The Divider

If Obama were a dead horse, I would say it’s time to stop beating a dead horse and move on. But he’s not a dead horse, and so that time hasn’t yet come.

Perhaps Obama’s greatest oratorical talent — certainly one he employs incessantly — is dividing Americans into villains and their victims (all in the name of “bringing us all together,” etc.), a talent that was very much on display in his Monday night address on the debt debate:

Most Americans, regardless of political party, don’t understand how we can ask a senior citizen to pay more for her Medicare before we ask corporate jet owners and oil companies to give up tax breaks that other companies don’t get. How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries? How can we slash funding for education and clean energy before we ask people like me to give up tax breaks we don’t need and didn’t ask for?

(Maybe the simplest way out of this impasse would be for the Republicans to agree to executing all the “corporate jet owners,” since Obama seems to have such a fixation on them.)

At the risk of engaging in dueling dualisms, let me mention an alternative “How can we ask … how can we ask” where “[m]ost Americans, regardless of political party,” do not understand the choice Obama himself has made. And, as it happens, in my example “secretaries” also feature prominently as victims on the short end of the stick.

In the GM bailout, as Shikha Dalmia, has pointed out,

The administration favored union workers not only over creditors, but also other workers. All United Auto Workers retirees at Delphi, GM’s auto supplier, got 100 percent of their pension and retirement benefits. But 21,000 nonunion, salaried employees lost up to 70 percent of their pensions, and all of their life and health insurance. The Treasury could have covered 93 percent of the benefits of all employees for the same funds it spent on full union benefits, testified Bruce Gump, a representative of the Delphi Salaried Retirees Association.

Among those 21,000 nonunion, salaried employees at Delphi, there were no doubt a large number of clerical workers, janitors, and, yes, secretaries.

“How can we ask” all those victimized workers to give up 70 percent of their pension and retirement benefits so that the fatcats in the UAW could keep 100 percent of theirs when all could have kept 93% if they’d been treated equally and asked to share a small sacrifice? I dunno. You’ll have to ask the post-partisan transformative unifier in the White House.

Whatever Obama’s explanation, it’s clear that when he said Monday night that his fabled (in his own mind) “balanced approach … asks everyone to give a little without requiring anyone to sacrifice too much,” he obviously wasn’t thinking of his friends and contributors in the UAW.