Another Political Compromise: Should We Have Expected Better?

President Barack Obama and the soon to be ruling GOP came to a compromise on the Bush era tax cuts. They will, if enough Democrats care to back their leader, be extended for all taxpayers for two years, at which point they will surely become a hot button issue in the 2012 campaign.

The entire scenario makes for an interesting lesson in American politics. The President says that the deal, before which his own party and he himself wanted to have the tax cuts for the wealthiest die, was the price which had to be paid to prevent gridlock. The question becomes, was it really the desire to move things along which forced his hand, or an early, slick move to demonstrate that he is willing to work with the opposition, thus setting himself up as the next Great Compromiser heading into the next election cycle?

Likely as not, it's little of both. It isn't as though the GOP had no incentive to make nice, either, as an extension of emergency jobless benefits was in the mix, and no doubt the Republicans don't want to be seen as against the downtrodden. But the critical point here is in how it demonstrates the American system. We force compromise on our leaders. We then assail them for not sticking to principle.

It is rare that we find much sympathy for politicians, but they do merit a bit in this light. Sure, they promise the moon. Sure, they twist the Constitution into a meaningless scrap of paper. Yet there is a degree of, what can they do? It is hard enough to be a principled man or woman left to our own devices. When we are a member of Congress and have to hope that 534 other men and women, and the President, and the courts and the ACLU and myriad other interest groups and individual citizens, will act as principled as we would like, we are really working against very long odds.

A bit of scheming is almost to be expected, on all fronts, then. It may pay us to remember that when we vote, and recall that, in the end, it is our demands which ultimately drive the system.