How far to the right is Obama willing to go in order to compromise? Not to say that compromise is inherently wrong, but it’s important to consider the motive of the side you are compromising with.  And when it comes to today’s GOP, particularly the tea-party wing, any effort to compromise automatically pushes everyone to the right.  Take the budget cuts as an example:

If their goal was to reduce spending, they would have accepted the Democrats’ offer to cut $33 billion out of the budget for the next six months — the same amount as Republican leaders had originally requested before Tea Party members forced them to double it earlier this year. As the president noted, that offer constitutes the largest cut to domestic discretionary spending in history.

But Speaker John Boehner and his negotiating team have continually moved the end zone. They spurned the specific cuts proposed by the Democrats because they did not end the programs reviled by the Republicans, including education improvements, health care reform and infrastructure rebuilding. They now want a total of $40 billion, a target that just emerged on Tuesday.

This story has been repeated over and over throughout Obama’s 2+ years in office.  Late last year Democrats’ compromised with Republicans and renewed the Bush era tax cuts’ for the wealthy, arguing that it was necessary in order to extend unemployment benefits.  Perhaps there is some truth to that, but compromising should have been the last resort.  They didn’t even bother going to the American people to aggressively make the case against the tax cuts, which would not have been a difficult task, since the tax cuts for the wealthy were unpopular.

This “cave and shift to the right” mentality of the Democrats’ does nothing but strengthen the Republican agenda by pushing the country further to the right, and it’s not surprising.  How do you compromise with a person who wants to limit the EPA’s authority to regulate air pollutants harmful to public health, which are estimated to have prevented 130,000 heart attacks, 1.7 cases of asthma, and 160,000 premature deaths last year alone.?  I suppose we’ll soon find out, because after the budget cuts have been passed to the cheers of tea-partiers, my guess is that regulation is next. And if the record of Democratic compromise is any indication, it doesn’t look good.