Listen closely to the political debate in Washington these days, and you can hear the rumble of shifting tectonic plates. The economic policies that have dominated for the last four years are slowly being repudiated, and a new paradigm is struggling to emerge—or, more accurately, re-emerge.
That’s the larger political meaning of the decision this week by House and Senate Democratic leaders to abandon a vote on the Bush-era tax rates before Election Day. Only a week ago, President Obama and his media supporters were asserting that they had Republicans caught in their class-war pincers: They’d lure the GOP into opposing an extension of lower tax rates for the middle class in order to defend lower tax rates for those making more than $200,000 a year.
In the event, the Democrats have cut and run, lest they get blamed for voting for a tax increase in a slow-growth economy. This is how legislative majorities behave when they’ve lost the political argument and can sense their days are numbered. They lose their ideological nerve and try to save their own individual careers.
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