I am not the only person who feels that some (most definitely not all) people on the left are holding the President to unrealistic standards. Here are three columnists writing about the original stimulus bill and the impending jobs speech.
Jonathan Chait in New York Times today on why he thinks Obama is getting a raw deal:
…the wave of criticism from the left over the stimulus is fundamentally flawed: it ignores the real choices Obama faced (and the progressive decisions he made) and wishes away any constraints upon his power.
The most common hallmark of the left’s magical thinking is a failure to recognize that Congress is a separate, coequal branch of government consisting of members whose goals may differ from the president’s.
Jonathan Alter defending the President in Bloomberg last week:
From the left: “He should have pushed for a much bigger stimulus in 2009.”
That’s the view of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, now gospel among liberals. It’s true economically but bears no relationship to the political truth of that period.
Ezra Klein, in Washington Monthly yesterday on how unrealistic it is to expect anything Obama proposes in his coming jobs speech to go anywhere:
The fantasy version of the [Congressional Republicans'] role can be found in Aaron Sorkin dramas and liberal op-ed columns, in which Obama’s rhetoric stirs the hearts of some while his rallying of the people inspires fear in the others. Republicans then agree to meet with Obama and work out a compromise plan. In some versions of the fantasy, the result is a big compromise that includes deficit reduction and revenue-raising tax reform. At some point in the drama, a weaselly political adviser warns his boss that voting for the deal could cost him his job. “So what?” the boss snarls. “It’s better to be an ex-congressman than an irresponsible congressman.”
However, Jon Walker at FDL does not agree that Presidential authority is as constrained as his fellow commentators believe. With brio, he presents his plan for steamrolling any opposition to more federal stimulus:
Obama should acknowledge the economy is bad, lay out a big direct jobs plan, and demand the GOP pass the whole thing. When the Republicans quickly make it clear they won’t pass the big jobs plan, Obama can publicly make it clear that Republican intransigence “forced” him to be creative with the powers he currently has. At this point, Obama should unilaterally implement his “Plan B,” creatively using unspent TARP money and using the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to implement massive mortgage refinancing and own-to-rent programs. If done right, it’s a substantial stimulus.
Readers: The President’s jobs speech approaches. As Mel Allen used to say “You make the call”!
The only people who believed in Klein’s story were those sitting in the White House. They are the ones who wanted a post-partisan Presidency.The stimulus was too small because the political team didn’t want Obama saying trillion. Then they wanted to move away from the economy and so the message was the stimulus was just right in fall of 2009 instead of pushing another round through reconciliation. The administration has sat on its hands with personnel leading the current mess with FHA.
Let’s explain it once again for those who are hard of hearing. It is probably true that the stimulus we got was all we could get. Obama’s problem is that he DIDN’T TRY for anything else. If he had, and had gotten less than he asked for, then he would at least have that story line right now. Instead he has accepted the conservative line at every turn and now he looks just like one of them. If he now chooses to come out fighting it really won’t look good……..and….alas……he won’t. Get ready for President Perry.
This is easy. The early 2009 stimulus was a huge victory AND it wasn’t enough. By mid 2009, early 2010, mid 2010, early 2011, etc, when unemployment was still 9%, they should have been pushing for more.
Potifar says best what I think, and IMHO Rob and chrismealy are right too.
“Obama wishes to be president of a country that does not exist. In his fantasy US, politicians bury differences in bipartisan harmony. In fact, he faces an opposition that would prefer their country to fail than their president to succeed.” That’s Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, courtesy Brad DeLong. I think that’s right too.
I don’t say McCain would have been better- God forbid. What I do say is that Obama’s people and administration haven’t played their hand nearly as effectively as they could have. I don’t know why that is. Maybe they just don’t know how to respond when the game has changed, as it has over his term. Maybe they’re playing a different game than I want them to; I suspect they are. But even if that’s true, I don’t see evidence that they’re playing well at the game they want to play.
Why, for example, does the administration almost never talk about saving the domestic car manufacturers? That would be a clear win for almost every constituency, and true into the bargain. Tens of thousands of jobs, immense industrial and financial assets, the value of current owners’ vehicles, all preserved. Yet radio silence. I could go on.
I never expected much from Obama policy-wise. In that sense the medical plan, for example, is a significant gain. What I did not expect, though, was an administration that would ignore its successes and- even if it was getting the best deals that were politically possible at the time (I don’t agree that was always the case, but never mind)- appear over-alacritous (not to say subservient) in bowing to superior force and unable to resist bullying.
I’m sorry, Keith. It may be that the policy outcomes have been the best possible ones available. But policy isn’t all that matters in politics.
Altoid: “Why, for example, does the administration almost never talk about saving the domestic car manufacturers? That would be a clear win for almost every constituency, and true into the bargain. Tens of thousands of jobs, immense industrial and financial assets, the value of current owners’ vehicles, all preserved. Yet radio silence. I could go on.”
Amen. This is the biggest mystery to me, the lack of marketing and communicating about what successes there have been. I am at a complete loss to explain it and wouldn’t try to defend it.
Poor Keith, sitting there eating brie, drinking wine in his ivory tower (inside joke for Keith), wondering why we poor benighted lefties can’t see there is no bully pulpit, at least when liberals come to town. In mid-December 2000, Republican House Speaker Denny Haestert (now there’s a trivia question for ya) publicly said that Bush Jr should not push for federal income tax cuts because there is simply no enthusiasm on Capitol Hill, especially in light of the way Bush Jr “won” the 2000 election. Suddenly, the president-elect and others in the incoming administration started to lay out a case. Then, the most harsh version was put forward, debated strongly and well, well, well…there you go. Federal income tax cuts galore for the upper brackets of income.
Obama had the wind at his back in the beginning of 2009. He could have seized the moment, looked Republicans in the eye, and said, “I’ll seek a Grand Bargain, but let’s have a Grand Public Debate since these guys still don’t get it.” He should have directly challenged Boehner or any of these other yahoos for a public debate on the way we must move forward. Heck, call out Limbaugh for a debate if the Republican leadership cowered, and hung Limbaugh right around their necks by noting how often they genuflected to Limbaugh. The message was ready and built for him: Big. Government. Spending. Infrastructure. Get. America. Back. To. Work. And as for the Democratic Senator Nervous Nellies, like Blanche Lincoln and the Nelson Boys (NE- and FL-), a meeting with them that said, “You want a primary, you’ll get one,” and shaming them by coming to their town with rallies that say, We Want Jobs Now. The primary threat is exactly FDR did to Gore Vidal’s Grandfather, Senator Thomas P. Gore (D-OK), for not supporting the initial New Deal. And it is what LBJ said to various Southern Senators and Congressman, where enough listened.
Keith, honestly, have you ever lead anything? Ever led any civic organization that was in trouble, and needed a new direction? I know it sounds arrogant and naive to you, but really, Obama has failed the leadership test. And he really needs to get out of the way before further disaster strikes.
Final note: I’ve been re-reading the 1962 reissue of the 1942 book by Stanford historian, David Potter, about Lincoln, the Republicans and the secession crisis of 1860-1861. It is fascinating reading, and it revealed once again how Lincoln began to draw lines in the sand in the weeks after his winning the plurality election of November 1860. Lincoln, unlike some in his own party, saw the significance of the Southern leadership’s plans to expand slavery by extending the American Empire south into Mexico, Cuba and the Latin American continent. It is why he rejected extending the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific Ocean and why he rejected the Crittenden “Compromise” as no compromise at all. He simply wanted a status quo agreement of no extension of slavery into other territories, and later only compromised by giving the South the territory of the now State of New Mexico, which failed to pass Congress.
Lincoln’s only failure was to grasp how militaristic the Southern leadership had become, and hoped there were enough Unionist supporters in the South who would realize the need for something closer to the status quo. But he knew how not to give in-compared to NY Senator Seward, who was a firebreather for the North, but wanted to get along with his Southern colleagues in the Senate. Lincoln, a trial lawyer (not a law professor), knew where the pieces were on the chess board, and moved them as well as any American leader before or since. He was not afraid of a war in the face of the military actions the South was taking, even though he was up against far more serious odds than Obama faced in 2009. The South was not withdrawing from the Union in 2009, despite Perry’s bombast, and if Obama brought jobs to the South, he’d have gotten far more wind at his back than he had at the start of his administration.
If anything, Obama resembles my beloved John Qunicy Adams and his administration (1825-1829), whose naive belief in post-partisanship made his one term presidency a failure. JQA delivered one of the greatest programmatic inaugurals ever, but the Southern Democrats, and Jackson supporters in the West, and a few in the North (led by future Jackson VP, Van Buren), openly stymied Adams’ initiatives. They did so even when they otherwise agreed with the policies before Adams started to push for them. And Adams, poor guy, never stopped trying to appease the Jacksonians, as if they would eventually compromise. They didn’t, and then ran against a do-nothing Adams administration, and walked into the White House in 1829. Does this sound somewhat familiar? Adams went on to become a fiery Congressman, where he was admittedly driven in part by a sense of vengeance. And there, he became well respected and sometimes feared as the years went on.
History does repeat itself in various, though not exact ways…There are patterns to American history, and we are foolish if we stick with a guy who resembles Hoover in the refusal to believe in transformative leadership, who resembles Adams without Adams’ clear vision.
Potifar,
Exactly right. Why is it so hard for Obama defenders to understand that many of his critics recognize the political realities he faced, but still think he could have made a better case, not given ground quite so eagerly, and at least made a pretense of fighting harder. Is that so incomprehensible? (And why didn’t he go to Wisconsin, by the way? Because Boehner would have been upset?)
I would settle for Obama not caving on something for once.
I don’t want to be the one to tell Walker that the FHFA is independent of the President, that the (acting) director Edward J. DeMarco has told Obama to bug off and that the FHFA might save the economy as soon as Republican Senators decide not to filibuster the vote confirming Obama’s new nominee (or when hell freezes over whichever comes first).
Obama has withdrawn the nomination of Joseph Smith and not tried another nomination.
The TARP bill requires unspent TARP money to be used to pay down the debt “The monies recouped from the TARP shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for the reduction of the public debt.”
Testing the limits of the law is not a great strategy with the current Supreme Court. Bush got away with a lot (not everything) but Obama won’t.
They have the House, 47 Senators, 5 Supreme court justices and the head of the FHFA.
Be real Jon Walker. Also some homework might be a good idea.
Kevin Drum in the post before he whistled the cats on stage today:
When you lose Drum things are starting to stink on ice.
And yes, I will know when the time comes to dim the laser on Mr. Obama, and focus like a fricking shark on the Republican nominee. There is a season to be a party apparatchik and put your blue tints on. This ain’t it. Steve Benen can hold the cheerleading fort down for us all by himself. Time for us to put on our finest skeptical goggles. Seems to me that an interesting question is, now that even Mr. Drum is up to speed: Is Mr Obama doing irreparable damage to the Democratic party brand?
He seems to be ceding core party acreage to the Republicans. The optics have gone beyond horrible awry. Half the Democratic party wants to vomit him up, but has no other place to heave-to. Meanwhile the other half of the party spends its time defending his lastest apparent fumble, first as the stuff of artful chess genius, and now that that has become untenable, as the result of the artful Republican genius to emasculate him.
Meanwhile some polls show Perry beating Mr. Obama.
He feels like a lame duck to me. Apathy follows in his footsteps…
No one ever won a US presidential election playing a bipartisan coward who won’t engage for the American/Democratic people.
Yet that seems to be the suit that best fits this sadsack president. He wears it with pride…
We got a loser of a leader here. A non-fighter. That’s bad enough. Worse yet there seems to be no exit. No alternatives. Our Democratic toilets are filled with crap and we can’t flush it. Even worse yet: In a few months we’ve got to put on our party hats and pretend this dog is the best thing that happened to America since the Clean Air Act. I sense more fizzle than fizgig….
So again, something to think about in idle moments:
Is this doing serious long term damage to the Democratic Party brand?
And if you think he is, what are the best scenariors for the Democratic agenda going forward?
This: “Kevin Drum in the post before he whistled the cats on stage today:
Barack Obama has pretty much caved in to the Republican contention that budget deficits are the biggest problem our economy faces. He’s pretty much caved in to the Republican contention that higher taxes are bad for the economy. And he’s pretty much caved in to the Republican contention that nothing big can done to improve the unemployment picture. So what’s his next cave-in on the economy? Apparently this. I guess regulatory uncertainty is what’s holding us back after all. So much for the agenda-setting power of the presidency.”
The major point here was that Obama conceded the terms of the argument - actually, help shift the terms of the argument - to something which is both factually wrong and against his (and our) interests.
After being stymied by the motherf*cking ‘do nothing unless it helps the elites and harms the rest of us’ GOP, Obama deliberately gave up the only leverage he had, which was to paint the GOP as the party hurting the American people.
Instead, after being stymied in many ways, he’s now going to run as somebody who *should* have been stymied.
The Jonathans and Ezra really aren’t very bright.
Pushing for a policy that you know is not going to work can never be a winner for Democrats. Period. Democratic voters are not Republicans and don’t generally see upside in bad policy that proves government to be ineffective. If the best a Democratic President can get is a policy that isn’t going to work he still needs to lay the groundwork for blaming Republicans when the shit hits the fan and the policy craps out. You do that preferably by fighting for policies that could work, even if it’s a fight you’re going to lose. You don’t do that by “fighting” for the policies you’re going to get and repeatedly lying by pronouncing that those policies are, contrary to reality, optimal policies. One goal of politics is to saddle your opponents with responsibility for the bad policies that they foist on you; you don’t embrace bad policies as your own and rely on hope and wishful thinking for things to turn our okay and enable you to take credit.
A President without the opportunity to take credit for good policy absolutely has to enable himself to lay blame for bad policy. Embracing bad policy as your own and hoping for the best is not a plan.
“Even worse yet: In a few months we’ve got to put on our party hats and pretend this dog is the best thing that happened to America since the Clean Air Act.”
Sometimes, the president makes it really difficult for supporters to defend him:
Forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but I know if pointed this out before at RBC. The President shot down this argument during the debt ceiling debate by getting the voters to jam Congressional phone lines. They did this for once reason and one reason only: because the President told them to. He can move the people quite easily when he feels motivated to.
Why are people demanding Obama go big and go long in his jobs speech while at the same time pointing out it will mean absolutely nothing policywise because the republicans will block anything and everything? Those people aren’t looking for a jobs bill, they’re looking for leadership, and leadership is about politics, not policy. This job speech is about more than just policy. The White House and its fiercest supporters have never understood this and it will be their undoing.
@JR
May I quote you?
“Those people aren’t looking for a jobs bill, they’re looking for leadership, and leadership is about politics, not policy.”
Exactly! Obama could be zero-for-the-world, but if that were because of GOP lunacy (and it would be, but it would also be necessary for him to make the point, over and over), he would have an approval rating in the 60s and we would be on the cusp of a great victory for the Republic (which could have happened with the 2010 elections, btw). But it’s all good, really. Obama and his family are set for life.
CDW… sure
One other thing, Keith. I realize this is simply an indication of my unreasonableness, but I won’t be listening. Barack Obama on my radio (TV has been disposed of) makes my skin crawl now like that of his predecessor did all those years ago. I once sprained a finger pushing the power button when Bush the Lesser’s voice emanated from my car radio. There is only so much rhetoric without foundation one can take.
The obstacles Obama faced in getting a bigger stimulus etc. were real. Then he made them worse by pre-capitulating. It doesn’t take a genius to know that if you ask Congress for $900B in stimulus you are going to get even less than that. If instead you started by asking for $1.5T, then maybe you end up with $900B and Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe feel all proud of themselves that they manipulated the stimulus to be less than a trillion but meanwhile you’ve gotten more than you would have been by cutting your initial offer in advance. If instead of making a large percentage of the stimulus tax cuts with weak multiplier effects from the start you only add tax cuts to it during negotiations with Republicans who agree to vote for the final package, then the final package will have fewer tax cuts and will be more stimulative. And so on and so on. The 60 vote Senate and later the GOP majority in the House have made it very difficult to get good policy passed, but the White House has often responded by not even trying.
You can feel enthusiasm among Democrats running out like air from a balloon.
The (perceived) cave on the debt ceiling and ozone regulation are really the last straws.
From what I hear Plouffe, Daley and his advisers told him the bipartisan “only adult in the room” sthick would work with Independents. Heckuva job, guys.
If Obama does not find red meat for his base over the next few months, he’s a goner.
What does our President have to do to earn Keith’s disapproval? He’s trying as hard as he can, and still nothing.