The President’s new budget recapitulates earlier fiscal negotiation strategies, going back to the debt limit fight of 2011, where he proposes bold action on deficit reduction and goes quite far in Republicans’ direction by including cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits (the chained CPI).  The goal now, as then, was to somehow broker the elusive bipartisan Grand Bargain on debt reduction.  Based on previous experience, how much payoff can Obama expect to get from the current strategy?

Not much. If history can be a guide, there are three clear lessons from past deficit fights. First, the “adult in the room” theory is a fallacy. That’s the idea that the President, by appearing to be reasonable and willing to make big concessions to his opponents, will gain a commanding political position. But taking the high road didn’t work last time and it won’t work this time either. Back in 2011, the public did indeed perceive Obama as being more willing to compromise and blamed him less than Republicans for the difficulty of reaching an agreement. But his overall approval rating nevertheless plunged as the public got sick of teetering on the brink of disaster while the economy sputtered. In fact, his approval went down the most (16 points) among political independents, supposedly the audience most receptive to the adult in the room act.

Second lesson: Cutting popular programs is unpopular. Last time around, significant cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security made their way made their way into various “Grand Bargain” proposals floated by Obama in negotiations. These were ultimately spurned by Boehner and colleagues, but Obama might not be so lucky this time. Better to avoid the trap by remembering these findings from a July 2011 CNN poll on possible components of a debt ceiling deal. While two-thirds of the public supported, in the abstract, the idea of cutting spending to solve the deficit problem, the public opposed cutting spending on Medicaid by 77-22, cutting Social Security spending by 84-16 and cutting Medicare spending by 87-12. And nothing’s changed since then: in a late March CBS News poll, 80 and 79 percent, respectively, opposed cutting spending on Medicare or Social Security to reduce the budget deficit.

Third lesson: Economic growth is much more important than deficit reduction. Obama, by virtue of his temperament, pressure from elites and, of course, the priorities of Congressional Republicans, will be tempted to privilege debt reduction over economic growth as he reaches for that elusive Grand Bargain. But he should remember that, as far as the public is concerned, you can’t eat Grand Bargains. That is, no matter how much the public says it cares about deficit reduction, ordinary people, unlike elites and their pressure groups like Fix the Debt, care far more about the state of the economy and how it is progressing. That has not changed since 2011: in Democracy Corps’ post-election poll, voters, by a thumping 62-30 margin, said that our biggest priority after the election should be growing the economy, not a plan to reduce the deficit.  And just two weeks ago, in a Marist/Morning Joe poll, 62 percent chose creating jobs as the top priority for Congress and Obama, compared to just 35 percent who chose deficit reduction. Note that among independents — supposedly the key group that gets excited about Grand Bargains — sentiment for creating jobs over reducing the deficit was an almost-as-overwhelming 60-36.

These are the lessons of our past deficit battles. Will Obama heed them? Well, he’s already getting the predictable cold shoulder from the Republicans, to be followed shortly by ever-escalating demands for more cuts and increasing public disgust with the whole process.  Perhaps some of the truths I’ve outlined here will then start to sink in and he will turn away, as he did in the fall of 2011, from fruitless attempts to reason with the GOP and advocate instead for the policies this country really needs.

That means taking his case to the public.  As John Judis recently put it:

When Obama takes an issue to the country, as he did financial reform in the spring of 2010, or as he did during the debate over the fiscal cliff, conservative Republicans complain vociferously that he is degrading the office of the president — forgetting, of course, that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush campaigned energetically for their policies. And lo and behold, the pressure works. Obama needs to get back out there and fight the budget battle. He has to make clear to the country that the cuts are threatening the recovery, and he has to make clear that what Republicans want to do is make further cuts to Medicare and Social Security. These are popular programs. These are not Solyndra or the Post Office. Obama can win this fight, but he has to get out of the White House and carry it on.

Exactly.  We can only hope that the day is not far off when he realizes that this approach, while not without risks, is considerably less risky than trying to strike a Grand Bargain with today’s Republican Party.

Deficit mania has officially taken over Washington—again. Both Republicans and Democrats, while they have different preferred approaches, are heavily focused on cutting budget deficits and relieving the long-term debt situation of the country. Yet unemployment remains at an unhealthy 7.6 percent, with declining labor force participation, and the modest economic recovery that’s underway has shown signs of sputtering — witness the latest jobs report which indicated only an anemic 88,000 jobs were created in March.

The simplest explanation for Washington’s monomaniacal focus on the deficit would be that politicians are responding to a shift in priorities among voters. The electorate, in other words, is now more worried about the budget deficit than the economy, so politicians have shifted their focus accordingly. But that explanation is simply not borne out by the facts.  The public’s concern for the deficit still lags far, far behind their concern for the economy and jobs: In a late March CBS poll, 41 percent of people in an open-ended question thought the economy/jobs was the most important issue facing the country, compared to just 9 percent who thought the deficit/debt was the top issue.  And in a late March Marist/Morning Joe poll, 62 percent chose creating jobs as the top priority for Congress and Obama, compared to just 35 percent who chose deficit reduction.

Another possibility that fits the “responsive politicians” explanation for current deficit mania is that voters, while perhaps not prioritizing deficit reduction, are particularly likely to punish politicians who do not take action on the issue. That is, even though deficit reduction is not the top concern for voters, voters will nonetheless turn against politicians who fail to make progress in this area. But this appears to get things backwards, especially when it comes to the incentives facing incumbent politicians. In reality, countless historical examples and empirical studies suggest that the surest route to getting booted out of office is poor economic performance — and this is the case regardless of whether politicians make progress on the deficit. Conversely, if the economy performs well, but little progress is made on the deficit, the incumbent party is still likely to benefit.

But if Washington’s deficit obsession is not simply a product of politicians responding to a shift in the public’s mood, where does it come from? The likeliest alternative is that, as political scientists Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro argue in their influential book, Politicians Don’t Pander, elected officials don’t so much seek to know public opinion in order to follow it, but rather so they can manipulate it to support their agenda and minimize any electoral damage that might result. This clearly fits the way Republicans are handling the deficit issue: Cutting spending on government programs is at the top of their policy agenda, so it follows that they wish to keep the political and media conversation focused as much as possible on deficits. Over time, they hope the incessant hysteria will move public opinion to their side, allowing them to pass more and more of their preferred legislation. Moreover, they are betting that their unresponsiveness to the jobs issue will not hurt them because the media will mostly cover the endless battles over deficits and spending, creating a news vacuum where the public is likely, lacking other information, to blame the party that holds the presidency for inaction on jobs.

Democratic complicity in today’s deficit-obsessed political climate is less easy to understand. Democrats, one might think, would place the jobs issue at the top of their agenda and exploit the clear public opinion preference for jobs to move their policies. But the assumption that jobs tops the agenda of all Democratic politicians is likely not warranted. There is a very significant section of the Democratic Party, including many moderates but also some liberals, that is not convinced by the standard Keynesian argument that deficits, even at their current levels or higher, are not a problem in the short run, while weak demand and slow job growth definitely are. These Democrats appear to be more impressed by arguments, retailed by the Bowles-Simpson Commission, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and a veritable army of editorial writers and pundits, that the country’s deficit and long-term debt problem is so severe that an immediate agreement to tackle the problem is necessary. Lacking an agreement on the debt, the argument runs, the U.S. will lose the confidence of its creditors and soon become an unstable, impoverished country. By this hysterical logic, an agreement on debt becomes far more urgent than dealing with the jobs situation.

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