The New York Times had an article yesterday with the promising title White House Debates Fight on Economy. The title may be promising but the content is not.
First we get some confirmation of jkw’s post The Headline President:
Mr. Obama and his aides are skeptical that voters will reward bold proposals if those ideas do not pass Congress. It is their judgment that moderate voters want tangible results rather than speeches.
In other words, Mr. Obama will only advocate support for stuff that can pass Congress — and that includes the rather conservative House.
Next we learn that almost all the advisers who were economists have departed leaving amateurs dictating economic policy. Their specialty appears to be stupid economic policy:
Mr. Plouffe and Mr. Daley share the view that a focus on deficit reduction is an economic and political imperative, according to people who have spoken with them. Voters believe that paying down the debt will help the economy, and the White House agrees, although it wants to avoid cutting too much spending while the economy remains weak.
So instead of large job-killing spending cuts, we’ll have medium large job-killing spending cuts while unemployment hovers above 9%. Peachy!
This confirms much of what Elizabeth Drew reported in the New York Review of Books, namely that the Obama Administration has decided that winning over “centrists” is the key to winning re-election. They have also decided that centrists want to see deficit reduction.
But don’t centrists really want to see the economy improve? How will doing things that have a negative effect on the economy pull up Obama’s poll numbers?
Fellow liberals, please consider what an Obama second term would be like:
Administration officials … have concluded that the best thing Mr. Obama can do for the economy may be winning a second term, with a mandate to advance his ideas on deficit reduction, entitlement changes, housing policy and other issues.
Great! We can have medicare and social security cuts in his second term! Just what we wanted!
Obama 2012
Barack Obama looks more and more dangerous with each passing week, as he spirals lower and lower into the rat-hole dug by our right wing.
“Deficit reduction” and “austerity” are NOT what this economy needs right now. Entitlement “changes” are not what this economy needs. Medicare and social security cuts are not what this economy needs.
What must we do to get him to listen to folks like Paul Krugman?
Paul Krugman just writes these arrogant, nasty columns that are red meat for the blue staters. His ideas are going nowhere, the Keynesian ship has sailed, boys. Nobody ever believed it in the first place, it was just an excuse to funnel money to certain zombie constituencies. He can see this happen time and time again, bill after bill somehow stimulating in the wrong way, year after year.
Do you ever wonder why no politicians in history, including St. FDR, have lived up to PK’s standards? Don’t you think it’s strange that no elected official can bring about, or has ever created, the pure stimulus he believes we need?
You can look at Obama’s stimulus bill and see that it was written by people who don’t believe in stimulus. That’s not new this time, it’s happened every time!
Doesn’t that tell you something?
It tells me that our political system is BUSTED, as in broken in pieces on the ground. I agree that “You can look at Obama’s stimulus bill and see that it was written by people who don’t believe in stimulus.” When I voted for Barack Obama for President, I expected a different outcome. That is the fault of Mr. Obama, not Mr. Krugman.
Whether Mr. Krugman’s columns are “arrogant” and “nasty” or not, he writes compellingly that the result of our delusional or dishonest pursuit of “austerity” will be the second dip of our Great Recession. The same policies produced the same results in 1937. This fact remains a fact, whether or not a majority of Americans today choose to believe it.
The said truth about today’s America is that we use words like “belief” to describe matters of fact. This does not bode well for our ability to surmount the many challenges we face.
The economy is unfolding precisely as Paul Krugman (and a generation of Keynesians before him) said it would, whether or not you or anyone else is willing to admit it.
appreciate, your perspective. This comment, however, lacks any substance whatsoever. You could have stopped at “Krugman Sucks.”
This is only one study, but it contradicts your opinion. (See page 18).
He’s a downer, so when things break he says “see I told you so (five years ago)”.
Democrats should forget Krugman and his outdated ideas. If Chait is right, then Obama wants tax reform with lower rates and fewer loopholes. I think he could find Republican votes to pass such reform tomorrow.
From Jonathan Chait’s blog
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/93453/the-two-crises-and-the-triumph-magical-thinking
The Law of Supply and Demand is pretty old, but it’s proven to work pretty well. By contrast, the Laffer Curve is a joke, but it’s only 30 years-old. An economic theory is only as good as its explanation of current conditions, prediction of policy effects, and ability to affect the economy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to prefer supply-side economics a la Reagan. Lowering the costs of production (supply) through tax cuts and deregulation will spur business and support the economy. I agree that these policies can play a part, but they aren’t sufficient to help our current situation. The multiplier effects for direct investment on infrastructure are much better than those for tax cuts.
If he were to come out with the proposal you suggest Republicans would find an excuse to oppose it tomorrow, even if they had advocated the same thing in the past.
It seemed to me that Krugman predicted recession every six months or so from late 2000 onwards, and when it finally came, got credit for being prescient. It’s like the weatherman who predicts a hurricane every day until, finally, he can say, see? I was right!
After the recession came, he immediately prescribed remedies, and continues to prescribe remedies, that are thoroughly outside the realm of political possibility. He might as well advocate solving the recession with cold fusion.
When the recovery comes in time, it will take him two years longer than everyone else to notice, and then he will explain why it isn’t really a recovery at all, and begin predicting the NEXT recession.
is that the NYT is picking up on what was previously marginalized to smaller publications.
See Elizabeth Drew.
And here.
Also, disturbing are the priorities of politics and policy. Politics always plays a part in policy, but when politics, i.e. re-election, guides crucial policy, there’s a problem with the office-holder.
If Obama holds on to enough independents, he wins. We have nowhere else to go, and he knows that. I don’t like the term centrist — I’ve never met one. But I have met a lot of independents who were essentially fiscal conservatives but put off by GOP social policies.
First, Americans have a persistent belief that Democrats are the party of spending. Polling even shows widespread misinformation about the budget during the Clinton years. If Obama were to reduce the deficit, he’d get very little credit for it.
Second, the deficit is extremely intangible. By contrast, unemployed family, neighbors, and friends are quite tangible. With the upcoming round of government layoffs, there will be an increase in such unmistakeable indicators of economic policy failure. This will reflect well upon Obama? Among centrists?
Third, the spectrum model of our politics is plain wrong. Independents consist of one bloc of voters who are essentially Republican, another which is essentially Democratic, and a third bloc of low-information types. One doesn’t appeal to low information voters by making abstract arguments about ineffable deficits.
Well, one doesn’t if one intends to win.
We, and the media especially, seem to lazily use that term for anyone who is not a Democrat or a Republican. However, there is Senator Sanders of VT who is “independent” in that sense, but those of us here I’m sure are aware that he’s LEFT of most Democrats and is in fact technically a Socialist.
Bernie is a Socialist. He’s NOT an independent. We assume independents straddle the fence because they do.
…including by himself at times. Next time he’s on TV and is identified at the bottom of the screen check it out. I can virtually guarantee it will say “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)” and not “Sen. Bernie Sanders (S-VT)”. While there are certainly some independents who really are moderates there are also plenty who will take results however they can get them.
I say one holds their base, and appeals to enough independents to beat the opponent. Sharron Angle gave Harry Reid a pretty good scare for a while, but in the end voters in the middle preferred Reid.
Look, I want the president to be more liberal too. But he isn’t. And there isn’t a challenger who can beat him. And there isn’t anyone else who can hold the presidency. He is better, way better, than any Republican running. He’s much better than possible third candidate Donald Trump.
I don’t know how to move him left, but I also know that calling him arrogant and psychoanalyzing him (see E. Drew quote in Mark’s comment) won’t do it.
People who are not policy wonks do not think, “That Obama he’s 30 degrees too liberal for me. Romney is 20 degrees too conservative. I guess I’ll vote for Mitt.”
What multiple regressions show is that the state of the economy predicts electoral outcome pretty damn well. So the Obama Administration has two roads to victory: (1) policies that fix the economy or (2) explaining the policies that fix the economy and running strongly against those blocking them.
Instead, the Obama Administration has accepted 9% unemployment repeat 9% unemployment. And they’re going to reduce the deficit because they imagine someone somewhere is going to freaking notice — and maybe say, “Oh Obama is now only 15 degrees too liberal for me. I guess I’ll vote for him now.”
Are you saying something like that? If you are, I submit that your left-right model is not very good or predictive.
You’re right, it’s not predictive. And I can’t really analyze what independents think. But it seems pretty clear that Bush alienated them, giving Obama his large victory over McCain.
I think they’ve decided they can’t fix unemployment, and apparently no one wants to enforce the full employment mandate assigned to the Federal Reserve Bank. So they’re hoping for recovery, probably a bad idea.
…should be both/and rather than either/or.
Something like 4 in 5 Americans are against cutting entitlements, are for raising taxes on the wealthiest, are for Medicare for all, are for ending our 2+ wars immediately, and so forth, all of which are either counter to Obama’s stated positions or at least counter to his functional positions.
Obama is practicing classic “Who the @#$% else ya gonna vote for, chumps?” triangulation, the hope being that if he stays a teensy bit to the left of the Republicans, the left and middle have no choice but to vote for him because he sucks a little less.
And the polling numbers reflect this: while Obama is today at a personal all time low, and the Congressional Democrats are also at or near an all-time low, the Republicans are even lower.
This is a despicable way to run a country. For 18 years triangulation has been the alpha and the omega of Democratic strategy: Democrats move within an inch of the Republican platform, the Republicans move further right to differentiate themselves, the Democrats triangulate further right, etc. And here we.
Scott Brown got an awful lot of votes in this state. Is Obama to the right of them?
That special election was turnout driven and one could just as easily argue that Dems didn’t turn out because they wouldn’t be sure what they were turning out for. Brown got as many votes as McCain did roughly, but McCain of course lost.
Democrats were dismayed to see what Obama morphed into between election and inauguration.
I believe that’s how Brown won.
I think that everyone is equally disaffected at this point.
Let me put this another way.
If Obama is far to the right of most voters, why did he get so many votes? He hypnotized the country?
*President* Obama has been something else entirely, and has moved hard right from his campaign promises ranging, from a public option for health care and no individual mandate all the way through this litany of issues:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-june-15-2010/respect-my-authoritah
…because he opposed the Iraq campaign. As I recall there were a few warning signs on the civil liberties front before the election as well.
Candidate Obama was all in favor of restoring civil liberties.
…and Jon Stewart found the right clips to make his point, but I stand by what I said about the warning signs that came out about such things as the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping.
I thought that his not left-wingism was pretty clear during the grind with Senator Clinton. neither of them was exactly fighting to get to the other’s left.
I suspect that there are other reasons that people assumed that he is far maore liberal than he actuallly is.
not for what he was, but what he wasn’t. It’s the same reason he got a Nobel Peace Prize. He wasn’t the moronic leader of a lying, bullying administration. Bush was a sow’s ear; in comparison, Obama was a silk purse, studded with diamonds and a gold clasp.
There is and was more to Obama than that, but people so universally hated the Bush Administration and its abject incompetence that Obama looked all the better.
but unenrolled voters will be more enthusiastic about someone who stands for something.
Initial polls of the political fall out of the debt ceiling debacle showed that Obama’s approval with “independents” had plummeted to 31%.
To follow up on Christopher and KBusch, unenrolled voters are increasingly diverse.
If it is on precisely this territory that the White House is expecting to reap more support among independents, then a 31% drop in support after the debt ceiling stand-off would indicate that their strategy is wrong. Quite wrong. Like “fire someone and get a new strategy” wrong.
That makes the New York Times article even more disquieting.
fish rots from the head down.
Obama seems to have a neurotic compulsion to be the gap-bridger, the peace-maker. You can’t build a bridge when there’s nothing on the other side worth connecting to.
I have no doubt there will be some interesting psychobiographies written about the man. Elizabeth Drew, whom I redundantly cited in my first comment, summarized Obama and his White House this way:
Re-read that block quote, and imagine it’s not Elizabeth Drew, but some reporter you dislike — Sally Quinn, maybe, or Charles Krauthammer.
Then you’ll see how loony it is. Rahm Emamuel offended allies by swearing? It’s 2011, and our Washington allies have sensitive ears?
And it takes a certain arrogance to run for president, let alone be president. I’m all for criticizing the president — strike that, no, I’m not all for criticizing the president, it’s feeding itself and descending into psychobabble. This wasn’t healthy when we did it to Bush. It’s worse now.
And “nothing worth connecting to? Seriously, Mark — you might hate every elected Republican. Fine. But the President of these United States cannot write off half the country.
…but Rahm Emmanuel was the poster child for the taking the base for granted attitude. The President also seems to take this as a badge of honor. He’ll proudly proclaim that some of what he does will upset his base. The implied message is, “OK GOP now it’s your turn to upset your base a bit,” but all the other side does is double-down, leaving the President to fight with one hand tied behind his back. The frustrating thing to many of us is that it often seems like Obama tied that rope himself.
quoted have corroboration elsewhere.
It is opinion.
that part is opinion. However the over-reliance on a small inner circle has multiple corroborations.
words and ideas, not the fact that he said it. I don’t know who Sally Quinn is, but the same goes. The fact is that I wouldn’t read either of them.
When it comes down to it, I really don’t understand what your point is. “Unhealthy”? Now who’s talking psychobabble? WTF does “unhealthy” mean? Have you ever read a biography of a political figure?
Here are some of my assumptions:
1. What Obama says, not just what he does, matters. Rhetoric lays the groundwork for action.
2. The personalities of Presidents have a direct effect on history.
3. President Obama’s actions don’t jive with Candidate Obama’s rhetoric. Why?
From my p.o.v., it seems like you, Paul, and Charley want to limit discussion to what you think most benefits Obama’s re-election. Anything else is a distraction.
(So much for giving up — I find it rude not to reply to direct questions.)
I can’t speak for Charley or Paul, but honestly I’m not telling you to shut up. Upthread, kbusch says to consider what re-electing Obama means for liberals. It means not electing a Republican, unless there’s some viable challenger to Obama I don’t know about. You say his actions don’t jive with his rhetoric. Well, his rhetoric is pretty careful, I’ll bet they jive more often than you think.
How do we constructively engage our frustration? I nominate Afghanistan, I think we can create some pressure for action there.
I also don’t think you’re telling me to shut up. We have a big disconnect that I think both of us (probably all of us) are trying to understand.
I’m working on a post that will provide us more fodder. The Drew Westen op-ed Hester links to was rebutted by Jonathan Chait. I think there’s a direct parallel to our conversations here.
It’s more collective than that. Note the backwards generation quote downthread.
Progress is unsteady.
I really don’t think armchair psychoanalysis, of either our allies or our opponents, gets us anywhere. I hate it when Republicans do it to us (partly because it always points to alleged dark conspiracies), and it doesn’t help us build bridges on our own side (say, with blue dog types).
The American left is nearly leaderless right now. There is no successor to Ted Kennedy. Paul Wellstone might have been, but he’s dead. So what do we do? Hope for the best from the president, figure out how to get it, and work toward it.
Suppose we abandon Obama and he loses. Who’s our champion for 2016? Do we even have a credible, lefty candidate for the nomination? The closest we came in 2008 was John Edwards.
If we’re very lucky Obama will get re-elected. Figuring out how he operates so we can influence him therefore becomes important. If some kind of psychological explanation turns out to be highly predictive, then we’d better pay attention.
It doesn’t frankly matter whether it’s psycho-babble or not. Does it fit the facts or not?
for the best 2-sentence explanation of how we got to this lamentable place.
From last Sunday’s NYT:
And Obama has done this in less than three years.
I give up.
In 2002 and 2004, Rove engineered a Republican majority that would last a generation. Generations aren’t what they used to be.
Getting your enemy to ‘just punch harder the next time’ is exactly the tactic employed (succesfully) by Mohandas Gandhi and MLK Jr. They did exactly and precisely because they DID understand “bully dynamics” completely and comprehensively, as the article you quoted goes on to detail.
And I’ve seen Obama take on conflict with his opponents: he stood up and called out the Supreme Court in his SOTU address after “Citizens United; pausing to stare down Sam Alito… He called out Eric Cantor at a press conference in which he had taken specific pains to invite Cantor and to make sure he was there. He called out John Boehner and others. The notion that Obama has a “deep-seated aversion to conflict” is an extremely wrong-headed idea, especially when so many on the left are accusing him of placing them in deliberate conflict with him.
who stand outside the world of political power and can invoke society’s moral condemnation of the bullies within. But if the position you occupy is a political one, it’s a losing and dangerous strategy. LBJ didn’t get the Civil Rights Act passed by acting like MLK.
(You and JimC sound more optimistic than I feel these days, which is nice.)
It was the non-violent moral condemnation of MLK and others that forced LBJs hand: without that, his default modus operandi was to try to out-bully the bullies.
And Abraham Lincoln, while not at all non-violent, did make excellent, and wholly political, use of moral condemnation. Both Roosevelts, also, were found of grasping the moral highground and beating their enemies to a pulp with it.
Didn’t Obama do what you guys want on Obamacare, which was unpopular, but he pushed it through? By your logic the Democrats should have retained the House in 2010.
He did NOT charge ahead, but cowered and prenegotiated like he so often does, plus polls showed that people favored it, even moreso WITH the public option, on which I repeat Obama did NOT charge ahead.
It’s still unpopular. Over 50% have favored repealing Obamacare since it was passed.
Maybe he has to act this way because you guys keep encouraging him to do things people don’t want.
What on earth would it take for liberals to introspect for a second on this, like maybe you’re wrong for once.
…and at the moment it appears split down the middle, with enough undecideds that neither side hits the 50% mark. I had a post from earlier in the debate here at BMG that showed that the public DID support what was then being considered. The trend seemed to be that the more the President backed away and the more people were exposed to the sausage-making the less they liked it. Again, the polls are there and like I just commented to you on another thread I don’t like arguing with people who make stuff up. You are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts!
Someone looking up information, you know facts, is contributing to the discussion. The downrating here is baffling.
for asking the question, Seascraper.
If ACA endures, it will be a great accomplishment.
Obama completely mishandled the politics. We won much of the legislative war, but lost the public relations/political battle. We might have lost that battle, but we could have lost it by laying the groundwork for future victories. Obama’s handling of the issue helped us lose the House in 2010.
The reality is that the wish-list of the left has, and had, zero chance of actually being enacted, notwithstanding a gallup poll here or there that says 50%+ of respondents support the wish-list.
Knowing this, Obama should have, on any number of issues, immediately, on Day 1, minute 1, kicked the left to the curb, kicked it in the shins, punched it in the nose, and then leave it stunned and bleeding while he pushes a centrist policy loudly. He should have killed the public option at the beginning, and then pushed for the thing that could actually pass, instead of sitting passively for a year.
Instead, he whispers sweet nothings to the left: he understands them, really, he does, and then, after they think he is going to deliver something that cannot be delivered, he disappoints them. And worse, far, far worse: he looks pathetic and weak in the process. His Democratic predecessor would never have made this mistake so often.
Bill Clinton flamboyantly hired David Gergen to play this part.
…is EXACTLY how the left feels Obama treated them on a number of key issues. I don’t believe in governing by polls, but when they show as you mention more than half the country ALREADY on your side, that is precisely the point that you leverage that to get significant change through Congress.
What that really means is that a smaller group of activists have super-specific ideas about what they want, and a much larger proportion vaguely supports some broad goals without necessarily knowing or caring about the nitty gritty.
I think Obama has some sympathy with the activists, but in the reality-based world, the wishes of these activists are not going to come to fruition. Obama then inevitably gets dragged to the middle and looks pathetic and weak. In this his politics are far more Carter than Clinton.
He ought to, as Clinton did, defy the left and then dare them to vote for Sarah Palin or Rick Perry. THEN he would have the leverage to force the GOP to give ground, as Clinton did to Gingrich in ’94. It probably would have been the same result– which ought not be surprising given the makeup of the Congress– but would have come off as a victory rather than a defeat.
Again, this is very Carter-like. It isn’t that the administration’s policy results are all that bad, it is that it can’t do anything at all without exuding weakness. Like Carter, it opens up a door for a GOP successor to do essentially the same thing with some minor tweaks, but do it with political skill, and call it a ______ Revolution. THAT is the thing that is unforgivable, not that you didn’t get your single payer, your public option, or a bigger stimulus package for the AFL-CIO.
…and loudly proclaimed that he was doing so. Just out of curiousity do you also advise Speaker Boehner to defy the right in equal measure, because for me that’s the only way this argument has any credibility?
I’m saying he should have done it IMMEDIATELY. Like December 2008, or October even.
The left somehow assumed that the 2008 Democratic majorities somehow meant that voters viewed neo-New Dealism and Great Societyism as re-credited as opposed to discredited. In reality, the only thing about Democrats that voters embraced was that they weren’t Republicans. And it was also pretty obvious that voters only supported health care reform in gauzy generalities, and turn on it hard in detail. So it was patently obvious from about the first Wednesday of November, 2008, that the left was to be disappointed.
Given that, he could have taken charge of the center RIGHT AWAY, when the ground could be given to gain leverage, rather than lose it. Instead, he always seems to accomplish the same thing in such a way as to make the Republicans seem victorious.
It isn’t that he defied the left, which was always going to happen anyway. It is that he only did so from a position of weakness rather than strength, and so does so always at MAXIMUM cost to himself.
You say that Obama defied progressives too little, too late, too rarely whereas many of us feel it was too much, too early, too often. I DO think some bad assumptions were made about Obama’s politics and what his election meant, but I at least am not trying to make him more liberal than he is. I just want him to fight a little harder for the things that he himself has proposed and said he believes in.
keep it comin
First of all, the idea of better health care, whatever you want to term it, is not, in the least, unpopular.
Secondly, it’s not Obamacare… Obama let slip the dogs of the Senate who hacked, mutilated and spindled the idea of the thing unto a bleary cardboard cut-out of its former self. As legislation it remains a start upon which to build further.
And thirdly, the 2010 elections were marked by extreme irrationality, over and above that of your normal, silly season, with wholesale lies (“death panels”) papering over naked racism. As an election, failure, but as an indicator of who fiercely some Americans continue resist the principles of the enlightenment, an invaluable lesson in how much farther we have to go.
will be the centerpiece of the Democratic platform in 2012 then
Like it or not, but two issues will dominate this Congress in terms of conceivably passable legislation and that is jobs and deficit rejection. The political advisers are wrong that independents care about the deficit, but the idea that nobody wants certain programs cut is disingenous because making health care more efficient can be spun as a cut (think about the 500 billion dollar “cut” Republicans whacked Democrats with in 2010). Perception is a huge part of the issue.
As far as stronger jobs position, I agree that something needs to be done (other than what Obama’s saying), but the fact of the matter is that the popular conception is that the Stimulus failed. It didn’t and I do not think the people who are all-in members of this community would agree the stimulus was bad. We may argue it did not do enough because of its size, but that argument is not the same as failure. So for the president, coming out and saying we need to spend money on stimulus, other than unemployment, is an invitation to be hit on how much stimulus failed. The only thing the president could do is say, send me a bill that creates jobs by encouraging demand. This would blunt the “economy is bad due to regulation” argument, but still leaves him without any firm policy. Another option may be to try and trick Congress by not talking about jobs, but push a bill about infrastructure. You know talk about structurally deficient bridges and demand they get money for repair. This risks losing credit for any work that does get done.
Honestly, the best option may be for the White House to apply back channel pressure to Congress and support Jan Schakowsky’s bill. Let the House Dems hammer–endlessly– that the GOP doesn’t care about jobs, maybe even shame them into passing something close to Schakowsky’s bill. If it makes it out of the House with enough Dem support, it can pass the Senate. That, however, could bear no fruit, too.
this Schakowsky bill?
This one.
I did some post special election analysis in some Merrimack Valley towns (using voter lists) and in a couple it appears that Brown got 100% of all the Republicans and the unenrolleds that voted, as well as some of the Dems.
There is no other way to interpret it unless you say more Dems voted for him.
Many said the vote was a proxy for unhappiness over Obama. Hard to see that the average voter will be any less unhappy in Nov. 2012.
As I said upthread, statewide he only did about as well as McCain. Not surprised by Brown’s MV showing though. A lot of people either believe or wish we were in NH, plus there do seem to be a lot of DINOs on the rolls. Dracut, for example has a D registration advantage, but has a nasty habit of voting R.
unhappiness might be tempered by fear if the GOP nominates a crazy person.
John Kerry won his Senate election in 1984 (he was not the incumbent) and Ronald Reagan won Mass that year.
Meanwhile, Nixon lost Massachusetts in 1972, but Edward Brooke got another term. The actual candidate matters and well, Coakely mattered and not in a good way.