Great piece from David Corn, looking at what went wrong for the Obama administration that the voters are so angry. David's piece could have been written by Joe and me.
It wasn't just what Obama did, but how he did it. The president forfeited control of the narrative—as they like to say in Washington—because he blew several specific opportunities.He goes on to explain the health care and financial reform debacles. Must reading.
SIZE MATTERS. The "original sin of the Obama administration," says former labor secretary Robert Reich, "was to make the stimulus too small while giving out too much of it as tax breaks to businesses." By most estimates, the stimulus saved or created about 3 million jobs, but it did not keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent, as the White House had projected (PDF). A stimulus twice the size would probably have generated about twice the benefits, notes Dean Baker of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, meaning unemployment might actually have dropped to near 8 percent, and GDP growth would have been 3.4 percent or higher. Instead, the low visibility of the results provided Republicans an opening to dismiss the stimulus (which to some voters may have become conflated with the TARP bailout) as wasteful. They had an easy line of attack: You spent nearly $800 billion, and unemployment is higher than you said it would be. In the absence of a stronger case from the administration, the assault resonated with large swaths of the public.
White House aides—and my colleague Kevin Drum—will say that Obama obtained the biggest stimulus he could, given GOP opposition. But the president need not have accommodated his foes so readily. "He could've demanded more, and settled for less," says a senior Senate Democratic strategist. That would have at least established a useful story line: For more recovery, we need to do more. Instead, Obama was left hailing a stimulus that didn't do enough.
