Does this really need to be explained on a liberal dem discussion site? yep.

[woo me with science]

19. +10000 Not only that, the threats were used to implement real austerity.

and they were used to poison the Democratic Party message and entrench the lying Republican narrative tying Social Security to the deficit and implying that deficit cutting is the most important goal for the country.

Every Democrat, every American, should be sick of the constant Third Way implication that these Social Security threats have been just words and didn't harm anyone. They have harmed EVERYONE.

1. Without the threatened axe of Social Security cuts (which kept returning as the austerity kept escalating), the Third Way would never have been able to sell the vicious budget and social program cuts they HAVE inflicted on Americans...by justifying them as the lesser of two evils.

If you had told us a few years ago that the Barack Obama administration would be presiding over government spending that assaults the poor even more viciously than the RYAN plan, we would never have believed it. Yet that is exactly where we found ourselves, surrounded by corporate mouthpieces exhorting us to be grateful, "because he didn't cut Social Security."

2. For years, Republicans have drummed lies into the heads of the American people about the source of our economic problems and how to fix them. They have pushed vicious austerity and malignant, economy-starving deficit-cutting instead of the real help to the 99 percent that is needed, and they have preached lies about the need to cut SS and LIES about its contribution to the deficit.

President Obama had from Day One of this Presidency to change the narrative about deficits and Social Security. Instead, he has yet again cemented the Republican narrative and made it a "bipartisan" narrative in a way that will not be undone anytime soon.

And this TEMPORARY suspension of the threats, of course during an election year, and of course simultaneously repeating Republican lies about how the deficit will cause them to return in the future....is the obscene Third Way cherry on top.