The hope that a Grand Bargain may result in a New Fair Deal for Americans is probably futile. This opening after the election was a very good opening for the two parties to reach a big deal on rewriting the tax code and changing entitlements. It failed. I think everyone knows why. The Republicans continued to threaten tax cuts for 98% of Americans in order to win them for 2%, which they more than did. This while Obama kept re-drawing his lines in the sand, giving many liberals heartburn when they consider what is likely to happen over the debt ceiling fight. I should point out here that "Obama's 'new' revenues" or "Obama's higher taxes" (mock quotes added since the expiration of the Bush tax cuts is not Obama's "fault" or "plan" for new revenues) will add less to the Treasury over four years than the world's richest added to their own pockets in one year -- $241B.
So what incentive will Republicans have to negotiate any further revenues with Obama? Zero. What incentive will they have to take him right to the debt ceiling limit again, as they did in the summer of 2011? Every incentive imaginable. I mean, it's not like they're held back by some ethos on keeping their country's creditworthiness intact. My hope is that he grows a pair and ignores the debt ceiling all together. It's not a Constitutional limit on Presidential power. It's a stupid quirk, wherein the idiotic Congress passes a budget then limits their ability to honor it.
I can seriously see Obama giving up big on entitlements soon, this despite a very mediocre "win" on taxes. He started his negotiations with John Boehner with an ask of $1.6T in revenues. He ended up with $600B...37.5%! At this rate, if he hopes to "only" cut $400B in Medicare, it will end up being a trillion. And then the Republicans will turn around and run against the Democrats in 2014 as the "Party of Medicare Cuts" who started death panels for grandma.
Does the future hold any hope for more Democratic leverage through elections? No.
According to ace analyst Nate Silver, writing one week after the election, the Democrats have little to no chance of winning back the House in 2014 -- in large part thanks to increased gerrymandering by Republicans in 2010 -- and the WaPo's Chris Cilliza documents that only 15 of the 234 Republicans elected to the House in 2012 won in a district where Obama was also the winner. As The Economist pointed out, Democrats got 49% of the House vote to the GOP's 48.2%, but the Democrats got 32 less seats = 46.2% of seats. Only in America!
So in fact, the Democrats could only stand to lose more of their leverage. The only hope you could have is that they would parlay their electoral losses into the same sort of government-by-blackmailing and filibuster-every-single-bill madness that the past few years of GOP clusterfuc*ery have shown.
