Analysis Of House Vote Shows Program Cuts Deal Skews To The Right.

President Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate have been struggling to convince rank and file Democrats that, somehow, they weren’t the losers in the debt ceiling negotiations that were allowed to devolve into a debate about how to cut the budget of America’s federal government. Citizens who have been paying attention to the inflationary capitulation of the Democrats to Republican demands can’t help but notice that the legislation passed by the House of Representatives yesterday reduces the deficit through budget cuts alone, not with any increased revenues at all. As a result of this legislation, working Americans will have a harder time making ends meet, while wealthy Americans won’t sacrifice a dime from their hoards. Yet, Democratic Party leadership is begging voters to believe that, somehow, progressive values have come out as the winner.

The numbers in the roll call of the House vote show the plain truth: Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership have formed a right wing coalition with congressional Republicans in order to move this deal forward.

Looking at the pattern of the vote broadly, we first notice that, while a minority of House Democrats supported Barack Obama’s deal with John Boehner, a large majority of House Republicans voted for it. 51 percent of House Democrats refused to support the deal, defying the President from their own political party. Only 27.5 percent of House Republicans opposed Obama’s deal. The Republicans seem much more happy with what Obama delivered than the Democrats do.

A look within the House Democrats, to see which Democrats supported Obama’s concession, shows this rightward tilt in the deal as well. Examining the liberal legislative scorecards for the House of Representatives assembled from key votes this year by That’s My Congress, it’s possible to compare the scores of Democrats who voted for the budget cuts yesterday with the scores of Democrats who voted against the budget cuts.

The result of that examination shows a remarkable gap of 12 percentage points. Democrats who voted for the budget cuts have, on average, voted for 12 percent fewer liberal pieces of legislation that Democrats who voted against the budget cuts.

Not only did a much larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats vote for the deal, Democrats who voted for the budget cuts tended to be more conservative, and Republican-like in their records, than Democrats who voted no.

For this deal, as for other deals such as the two year extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for billionaires last December, Barack Obama isn’t working with progressive Democrats in Congress. He’s working with a coalition mostly made up of Republicans, with some conservative Democrats added in.

That’s not what Democrats were looking for in the 2008 presidential election. It ought to be clear to liberal Democrats now that the only way that they’ll be heard by the White House is if they run a candidate to challenge Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2012… and then support another liberal candidate to campaign against Obama from the Left in the general election as well.

Obama won’t work with progressives. Progressives ought to return the favor.