I don't know if he did or not. He was, after all, instructed to keep his
hands offThe collapse of the supercommittee is not Obama’s fault. If he had pushed and prodded and cajoled and horse-traded, the result likely would have been the same. Perhaps even worse, in the sense that the partisan digging-in might have been even more entrenched.
For all the eleventh-hour, “where-was-Obama?” moaning, the bipartisan congressional directive to the White House as the supercommittee did its work was simple: Back off.
That’s right. The message from both Republican and Democratic members of the group was that presidential involvement could only be counterproductive. The more a particular approach was associated with the president, they argued, the harder it would be for Republicans to embrace it. Anything that looked like an Obama “win” would have been unacceptable to Republicans in an election cycle.
Amid the predictable clamor about presidential absence, it’s hard to remember that Obama submitted his own proposal to the supercommittee — much to the consternation of some Democratic members.
The president’s plan was disappointingly timid and riddled with accounting gimmicks, but it went far beyond the $1.2 trillion in savings that the supercommittee failed to produce. Somehow I don’t recall Republicans at the time praising Obama for bravely stepping forward to lead.
The blame game is a dreary enterprise, but if we’re destined to play yet another round, let’s go back and at least take a more nuanced view of the ledger.
