I guess we’ll hear more tomorrow. But the signal that Simpson-Bowles is going to be the Democrats’ starting point in budget negotiations doesn’t suggest anything good about where the president wants to take this debate. The broader point though is that as long as the president is talking purely about dollars, he’s losing and will continue to lose.
As I argued yesterday (and as Paul Begala puts it in a different way here), the president needs to open a contending conversation about values, how we want to govern the country. Do we want to abolish Medicare or not? That’s a moral question and one that people understand intuitively. Scrap Social Security or not? Those are basic policy, values and moral questions you need to answer before you get to the dollars and green eye shades.
Ezra Klein says the White House is telling him that “will not primarily be an endorsement of Simpson-Bowles, and ‘this will make more sense tomorrow.'”
