“Obama proposed cutting Social Security benefits and raising the Medicare age to 67. After initially refusing to negotiate over the debt ceiling, the White House pivoted to a full-scale embrace of austerity in the hopes of taking away the Republican Party’s main talking point ahead of the 2012 election.
Sanders was one of many members of Congress standing athwart this rush to austerity, though he did go further than any of his colleagues by suggesting a primary. His remarks were only a minor news story at the time, but the basic dispute is now mapping onto the entire Democratic primary, which has become a battle between progressives who are preoccupied with immediate constraints and compromise and those who seek to change the terms of debate using grassroots pressure.
Obama actually proposed more deficit reduction in the summer of 2011 than Republicans were asking for—$4 trillion instead of the $2 trillion the GOP had been requesting—and at times the White House was reportedly willing to raise revenue only through closing tax loopholes. That meant in addition to the safety net cuts, the Bush-era tax cuts would either be locked in or even lowered in some cases.
This was a monumental diversion from Democratic Party principles. For years, Democrats ran for office on promises not to cut Social Security and Medicare. They railed against the Bush tax cuts in every election cycle since the tax package was enacted. Republicans already enjoyed bashing Democrats for supposed safety-net cuts; one of the most frequently run advertisements of the 2010 midterms noted the Affordable Care Act cut $700 million from Medicare. (These cuts were mainly on the provider side and did not affect benefits, which was never mentioned in the ads.)
Aside from being potentially catastrophic politics, the Social Security and Medicare cuts were bad policy. Increasing the Medicare age would have lowered federal health spending but increased overall health spending by much more, and would have left many seniors uninsured. Obama’s method for reducing Social Security benefits by changing the Chained-CPI formula would have resulted in fairly minimal long-term budget savings but would have cost the average senior $28,000 by age 95…
Sanders represented the other view—that there were certain red lines Democrats shouldn’t cross, and that elite opinion had wandered far astray from where most voters actually were. “What [Sanders’s] point was, really clearly, was that there needs to be a progressive alternative that is clarion and clear that people can understand, and that the counterpoint would be to the Tea Party, which was pulling the entire debate to the far right at that time,” said Lawson.
What happened since has 2011 has left many progressives feeling like Sanders was vindicated. “What Bernie Sanders was describing then is exactly the dynamic that is working out positively for Democrats now, which is a race to the top on popular economic populism issues,” said Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “He wasn’t proposing defeating President Obama, he was proposing moving President Obama in a more economic populist direction. It’s what we’ve had in the primary, and what we had more of in Obama’s second term.”
The Nation
By George Zornick
