If I had been of a quantitative disposition, this childhood enthusiasm might have led to a career in hydraulics, but I’m more inclined to metaphor than calculus, and so I’m more inclined to see that bathtub as a metaphor for the American body politic than an exercise in fluid mechanics—that is to say, when you strive to drive all of the water up to one end of the tub, you guarantee that it will eventually slop all the way back to the other end of the tub. Final victory will always elude your grasp.
The Tea Party’s reckoning with this principle appears to be at hand. Its great triumph—and the Obama Administration’s great humiliation—over the increase in the debt ceiling last summer, which appeared to herald a new era in American politics, now appears to be swallowed up in politics as usual. After strapping a bomb to its chest in the form of an automatic “sequestration” of $1.2 trillion over the next ten years in the absence of a massive debt-reduction package by a special “super committee” (or “Super Committee,” or Supercommittee,” or “supercommittee”—even agreement on spacing and capitalization seems to have eluded the poor creature), Congress has suddenly realized that they can take the damn bomb off any time they damn please, which is exactly what they’re planning to do—“planning” being the conscious/unconscious decision to allow the parallelogram of political forces to carry them downstream—for politics, like water, always seeks its lowest level.
A clever person might have predicted this, because the Tea Party rose to power by 1) promising to cut spending and 2) denouncing the Democrats for cutting spending. The chattering class was so busy congratulating itself on seeing through President Obama’s plan to cut $500 billion out of Medicare that they didn’t really notice that voters were afraid that the cuts would take effect, not that they wouldn’t.
In theory, the Democrats should be sitting pretty, but of course they aren’t. If they were “smart” they would threaten to let the Bush tax cuts expire—after all, the country was more prosperous without them than with them—but Democrats have long been convinced that Republicans own the tax-cutting issue. For the past five years the Democrats have been talking about how much they want to raise taxes on rich people, but they’ve never gotten around to it, which suggests that they don’t want to raise taxes on rich people, or anyone else.
Still, the water is slopping back the Democrats’ way. When the super committee shrivels to nothing—as it will—the Republicans will decide that they can’t really let the projected sequestration of defense monies take effect. Romney, after all, is demanding that defense spending will go up, and as his rivals continue to implode, congressional Republicans will have to listen more closely to what he’s saying. Democrats, of course, don’t really want to cut defense spending either, but they will (rightly) insist on extracting a price—reduced cuts in domestic spending.
The new farm bill points the way—lots of money for food stamps and Amtrak (not previously regarded as a farm program) plus enough gimmicks to make the World Trade Organization gag. Supposedly, we’ll be whacking a whole $2.3 billion a year out of price supports (less than 10%)—not exactly a hardship, since farm income is at an all-time high—but you can bet that succeeding Congresses will find a way to sweeten that bitter bill with emergency supplementals and add-ons. There’s always a drought or a flood somewhere, if you look hard enough. And, if you wait long enough, always water running back to the other end of the tub.
