How cute: the NYT still thinks Obama won the tax cut fight.

Really, this is adorable:

[David Plouffe] rejected the suggestion that Mr. Obama, who forced Republicans to accept higher taxes on the wealthy after re-election, has been too passive.

Not the passive part, which is a) true and b) hopefully not worrisome at all to Democrats.  But here’s a harsh dose of reality for the Times’ mellow: in order to ‘win’ on tax hikes, all Barack Obama had to do was wait.  He campaigned on removing all of the Bush ‘tax cuts.’  All of them.  They were set to expire, and Obama could have had that happen with no fuss, no muss, no drama… and approximately one hundred million or so people screaming at him.  Instead, he made a deal with the GOP where they came in with nothing and walked out with 98% of the tax cuts that they campaigned on to preserve AND Obama taking the blame for the Alternative Minimum Tax fix*.

Oh, yeah.  Twist my arm a little more on that, dude.  And we lost that one so totally, ya, you betcha…

Moe Lane

*Short version: thanks to inflation the AMT had been looming over the heads of middle class families for years – this is why you never, ever make a fixed amount of revenue the trigger for a tax, by the way – and Congress had been kicking the can down the road for years.  This had an effect on the budget, largely because budgetary estimates had to pretend that Congress would not be doing the kicking with monotonous regularity.  That problem is now fixed, and now Senate Democrats have one hundred billion or so less of phony ‘spending cuts’ to use to provide cover for their ham-handed efforts at social engineering.  Say thanks to Barack Obama for that, guys!