Obama, Democratic Party bow to pressure coming from right
Because that is what our president is: a moderate, committed to taking the middle road whatever the cost, while the opposing party keeps pulling the center further to the right. Not too long ago, the "compromise" Obama and House speaker John Boehner nearly reached last year would have been called conservative. The same is true, incidentally, of the president's health care reform legislation. There is no left in our politics anymore, just the center and the right.
All last year both parties were obsessed with the deficit, at least in their rhetoric. The Republicans still are; they always are, but with them even more than with the Democrats, it really is just rhetoric. Rep. Paul Ryan, lauded by many as a very serious person on fiscal matters (receiving an award for it), just came out with a new budget — and it is mostly tax cuts. He will tell you tax cuts generate revenue, because they spur growth. This might sound fine on paper, but it has failed before. This is the same very serious person who last year proposed reducing the deficit by replacing Medicare with coupons.
Any good economist will tell you that reducing deficits should not be a priority during a recession. Mountains of empirical evidence, from Franklin D. Roosevelt's pivot to deficit-reduction in 1937 to the recent experience of austerity-obsessed governments in Europe, demonstrate that spending cuts in a sluggish economy slow that economy even more. It is, after all, a shortfall of demand — of consumer and business spending — that slows the economy in the first place. If the government cuts spending, too, then that only aggravates the problem.
That is the environment in which the Obama administration decided last year that deficits should be their first priority. Now they would like us to believe they are more concerned with jobs and growth; they would like us to forget that last year even happened. It's not easy to hold the Democratic Party accountable when it veers to the right, since the only other party that can win elections here is even further right. But at least we can start looking for a new alternative.