Obama’s Fiscal Cliff Sanity Proves He’s No Secret Agent of Destruction - The Daily Beast: The fiscal-cliff crisis may have accomplished almost nothing in settling our most serious policy disputes but it should put to rest the illogical notion that the presiding chief executive somehow advances his own interests through economic devastation. For 99.4 percent of all U.S. households, the president ended up agreeing to permanent consecration of the same Bush tax cuts he formerly blamed for all the economic reverses of the last decade. He accepted only a third of the new revenue he had demanded as absolutely essential to deficit reduction as recently as a month ago. In the aftermath of the agreement, Democrats seem not only surprised at the scope of the president’s concessions to the GOP, but utterly amazed that most Republicans appear unable to assess the significance of their own gains in the negotiations.
In part, that blindness stems from the lingering fear that any perceived success for Obama involves inevitable harm to America’s prospects for prosperity, because the president yearns to crash the economy as step one of imposing a new socialist system. Abandoning this delusion will not only allow the GOP to improve its political prospects but will foster a more realistic and constructive role in governance.