I'm always struck by the red herring, repeatedly trotted out by defenders of the President, that his critics simply don't understand politics. In fact, it's many of the usual presidential defenders who have never held a real job in politics, whereas many of Obama's critics are some of the most politically-experienced Democrats in town.
I raise this point because the old canard, that liberal critics of the President just don't understand how hard politics really is, is rearing its head again. This time by Jonathan Chait of the New Republic, writing in the NYT:
[T]he 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.A few points.
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. Congressional Republicans pursued a strategy of denying Obama support for any major element of his agenda, on the correct assumption that this would make it less popular and help the party win the 2010 elections. Only for roughly four months during Obama’s term did Democrats have the 60 Senate votes they needed to overcome a filibuster. Moreover, Republican opposition has proved immune even to persistent and successful attempts by Obama to mobilize public opinion. Americans overwhelmingly favor deficit reduction that includes both spending and taxes and favor higher taxes on the rich in particular. Obama even made a series of crusading speeches on this theme. The result? Nada.
1. Leftists?
It's not a serious critique if you're going to use right-wing slur words like "leftist" to describe presidential critics (used in the first graf of the piece).
2. Our problem is that we fail to recognize Congress as a separate and coequal branch of government?
I worked in Congress for five years as a lawyer to a senior US Senator. I think I'm familiar with Congress' existence, and how it works. Yet, I still am highly critical of the President's refusal to stand up to Congress. I'm critical precisely because I worked in Congress, and have worked in national politics since 1989 (I'm 47 years old), and thus I'm intimately familiar with the President's options.
3. The GOP is mean.
Uh yes they are. And they were mean to Bill Clinton when they shut down the government in the 1990s (is anyone really willing to argue that Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey weren't as mean as John Boehner and Eric Cantor?) Nixon was pretty mean too. As were lots and lots of Reagan's henchmen, and George Bush's. Republicans tend to be pretty mean political players in general. This isn't new, and it isn't news. It also is no excuse for the President's actions (presidents can be pretty mean too, they're not exactly powerless).
4. Obama had 60 Dems in the Senate for only four months.
And George W. Bush never had more than 55 Republicans in the Senate throughout his eight year term, and I don't recall him whining about how weak he was.
5. The notion that Obama's good-hearted, full-throated efforts to defeat the GOP noise machine have proven ineffective.
Let's revisit this graf:
Republican opposition has proved immune even to persistent and successful attempts by Obama to mobilize public opinion. Americans overwhelmingly favor deficit reduction that includes both spending and taxes and favor higher taxes on the rich in particular. Obama even made a series of crusading speeches on this theme. The result? Nada.When has the President ever been persistent in pushing a message? He has, in fact, persistently led from behind. On the stimulus, rather than going to Maine and calling Olympia Snowe's and Susan Collins' bluff, the President decided to have Rahm quietly negotiate with them behind the scenes, and slowly he gave away the bank. And on health care reform, the President was missing in action for most of the year, giving only the occasional speech, but most certainly not making any real concerted effort to win over the American people. Hell, the President sold us out on the public option and prescription prices from the beginning, we now know.
These are White House talking points at their very worst. The notion that whatever the President does, the forces of GOP evil will inevitably win unless he caves. And perhaps, sadly, that's true - with this president. Because whatever he does tends to be half-hearted. He doesn't stand up to his opponents, unless they're to the left of him. And he doesn't either understand, or believe in, full-throttled PR campaigns. So to suggest that he gave it the good old college try, and failed, is just flat out wrong.
Where's the ongoing PR campaign defending the successful (but too small) stimulus? Where's the ongoing PR campaign defending health care reform? I've not seen it. And can't name anyone who has.
Next, Chait notes that in late 2008, early 2009, liberals were asking for a smaller stimulus than what was actually passed, so, he seems to imply, Obama actually got more than anybody wanted! In fact, in the first months following the Lehman collapse, economists and others didn't fully grasp how bad things were going to get - so, yes, by November of 2008 people like Krugman were asking for a much smaller stimulus than they were recommending just a month or two later. Why? Because as each new week dawned, the economy got far worse than anyone had ever predicted. By the time Congress got working on the stimulus plan, the experts said it needed to be far bigger than what the President was asking for.
So while people did talk about a $200 to $300bn stimulus in the waning months of 2008, the amount the experts thought was needed kept growing by the day, until Krugman and Stiglitz finally said we needed a good $600bn to $800bn a year, for several years. And that's not what we got. By early January of 2009, long before the stimulus was passed, both Krugman and Stiglitz had weighed in to say that the amount the President was asking for was far too small. And I quote Krugman at length, from January 9, 2009:
Mr. Obama’s prescription doesn’t live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat. In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed....A third of a loaf. And he was right. But this White House doesn't particularly like liberals - of leftists, should I say - and thus Krguman and Stiglitz were ignored, which is a big part of the reason we're in the economic mess we are today.
To close a gap of more than $2 trillion — possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic — Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough....
But only about 60 percent of the Obama plan consists of public spending. The rest consists of tax cuts — and many economists are skeptical about how much these tax cuts, especially the tax breaks for business, will actually do to boost spending. (A number of Senate Democrats apparently share these doubts.) Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center summed it up in the title of a recent blog posting: “lots of buck, not much bang.”
The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job....
Whatever the explanation, the Obama plan just doesn’t look adequate to the economy’s need. To be sure, a third of a loaf is better than none. But right now we seem to be facing two major economic gaps: the gap between the economy’s potential and its likely performance, and the gap between Mr. Obama’s stern economic rhetoric and his somewhat disappointing economic plan.
So let's not rewrite history and pretend that the stimulus the President passed was somehow bigger than anyone wanted at the time. It was already too small, a lot of us knew it, and in spite of the fact that America was thought to be on the verge of another Great Depression, the President blinked and asked for less than what many knew was needed. That's hardly a profile in courage, especially when you're at 67% in the polls, have just won a massive mandate, and your opposition is in ruins.
And let's not forget that while the nation teetered on the verge of another Great Depression, the White House didn't define "victory" as getting the amount of money needed to stop that depression, but rather, they defined victory as crafting a bill that would get 80 votes in the Senate, rather than the 50 (or 60) needed to simply pass the bill. In other words, they were willing to sell away substance in order to get a super-majority of votes. I'd have rather had 51 votes (or 60) and gotten the amount of money we actually needed.
Again, Krugman saw it all coming on January 6, 2009:
I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”Yes, rather than everyone expressing their surprise at what a wonderfully large stimulus package the President was asking for, in fact, the experts were pretty damn upset about what the President was doing, and they predicted, to a T, how the stimulus would be perceived as an abysmal failure.
President Obama was uniquely situated, shortly after the election, to get whatever he wanted from Congress, had he simply tried. He didn't. Whether it's because he's politically naive, conflict averse, or some manchurian Republican, the President simply did not do what was required to pass the legislation that was necessary. As Joe and I have described on the blog repeatedly, the President had options. He could have barnstormed Maine and forced Snowe and Collins to support a larger stimulus, but he didn't. He could have taken the battle to the Republicans, nationwide. But he didn't.
The failure of the stimulus was a failure of the President's leadership. For whatever underlying reason, Barack Obama is conflict-averse. And no rewriting of history will change that fact - it simply guarantees more of the same in the future.
