While most progressive commentators responded in true Pavlovian fashion to hearing the words “spending freeze” and embarrassed themselves, some people realized the truth about this stupid proposal.
“While the freeze would shave no more than $15 billion off next year’s budget — barely denting a deficit projected to exceed $1 trillion for the third year in a row — White House officials described it as a critical part of a broader deficit-reduction campaign intended to restore confidence in Obama’s ability to control the excesses of Washington.”
Steve Benen was typical of the sensible progressive response, but he still is focused on the wrong problem.
Indeed, while we wait for additional details — an administration official said the cuts would target “duplicative,” “ineffective,” and “inefficient” spending — I’m tempted to call the freeze idea symbolic, at best. In President Obama’s first budget proposed cutting $11.5 billion in spending, and most of the cuts were approved by Congress. This next budget, including the freeze, is eyeing reductions between $10 billion to $15 billion.
So, if the proposal isn’t really going to change much, why is this disappointing? Because it fully embraces the conservative narrative, instead of using the power of the bully pulpit to explain why conservatives have it wrong.
It may be even worse as a policy matter — we just don’t have enough details to say — but that’s distressing enough.
This is the same framing/Overton Window rabbit hole that progressives seem obsessed with, but really means nothing. The problem isn’t that “spending freeze” ostensibly endorses a braindead McCain campaign proposal. The problem is that the proposal is a joke that will be taken seriously by exactly no one in the commentariat (excluding Pavlovian anti-Obama progressives). So, in the arena of public opinion making, this proposal is indefensible and will be rightly ridiculed by all sides. It’s only virtue is its unseriousness, and that is no virtue at all.
Having said that, it will cause no real harm beyond whatever political cost there is to being laughed off the front-page.
This is the same framing/Overton Window rabbit hole that progressives seem obsessed with, but really means nothing.
Why does it mean nothing? And you know that Cranky McSame has hopped aboard the bus now, right? Now the TradMed is really gonna eat it up. Do you believe it’s good to move the so-called Overton window to the left?
Do you know why they’re doing this? It’s because they’ve done extensive polling about the exact kind of voters that went for Obama in ’08 and went for Cristie and O’Donnell in ’09 and Brown in ’10. And what they found is that these folks are eating up all the bitching about irresponsible spending in Washington, and they’re pissed off and want something done about it. So, viola, Obama proposes to do nothing new about it and call it a “spending freeze.”
The whole purpose is to appear to be doing something about an issue that is killing us. Trying to persuade this universe of voters that they are stupid and should embrace more deficit spending is not likely to move the Overton Window to the left, but to alienate them even further.
This was simply an unforced error, not some grand plan to smash hippies or embrace centrism. Try not to take it personally.
Let’s assume for a second that these voters will be moved and applaud Obama for this (I think that’s a wildly farce assumption, but let’s assume it’s true).
Now, how does Obama defend additional spending in the future now that he’s ceded this ground? He will still be called a tax and spend liberal no matter what he does because of how our party identities have been ingrained (do people remember Clinton or Reagan as the fiscally responsible one?). So why even worry about these lunatics at all, and instead argue that health care reform is the biggest thing that hurts us, as he did during the campaign? He’s ceding unnecessary ground, and it’s pissing me off. Yeah, that’s another thing: the hippies will continue to get pissed off.
Think of it like Guantanamo and trials. Rather than giving them all trials like he should, he’s said some deserve trials and some don’t. Now a right wing meme is “If we aren’t giving trials to some, why give them to any?” It defeats Obama’s own argument.
What am I missing here?
Okay, with the caveat that I think calling this a “spending freeze” was monumentally stupid, here is what you are missing.
Obama is going to have to tell the American people that we need to spend $150 billion more on stimulus (which is probably insufficient) at a time when the polls tell us that we are hemorrhaging support from voters who are mad about spending. We wants to inoculate himself somewhat, to stop the bleeding. So, he does what he did last year and caps new authorizations. The thinking is that he can’t allow himself to look indifferent to the deficits he’s forced to pile up to address the unemployment problem.
Obama is going to have to tell the American people that we need to spend $150 billion more on stimulus (which is probably insufficient) at a time when the polls tell us that we are hemorrhaging support from voters who are mad about spending.
And why are the voters mad about spending? That’s the problem. Would they be mad if the spending was putting them back to work? Are the voters being manipulated by the NYT and Kaplan Test Prep Post?
why shouldn’t they be mad about deficit spending? Of course they’re mad, because their government is going in hock to the Chinese and has to sustain the illusion of continued American prosperity on the back of bubble-creating low interest rates that are unsustainable. Generational theft is supposed to be popular?
I think what you mean to say is that people should be more aware of why we need to do stimulative spending to create a job market. But Obama is going to attempt exactly that. This announcement has no bearing on the next stimulus bill.
Here is the latest Atrios:
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2010/01/when-freeze-isnt-freeze.html
He says it better than I can.
Depends. Selling this as a “spending freeze” won’t convince anyone.
Selling this as an effort to refocus federal spending on stimulative job creating initiatives so as to keep the deficit as low as possible?
That’s not bad.
Obama needs to drop “spending freeze” from all drafts of his SOTU speech.
Why? Because voters are mad about spending on Wall Street, not spending on them. Is the public mad about extended unemployment benefits? Cash for Clunkers? Or are they mad about bank bonuses? Of course, “social programs” is a right wing code phrase for “welfare”. People don’t stop to think that social security, medicare, and unemployment compensation are all social programs. They’ve been trained like Pavlov’s dogs to foam at the mouth because “welfare queens” and “lazy loafers” are getting “their” tax dollars. It’s so old that it’s classic, turn the middle class against the lowest class, so they won’t notice that the upper class are cheating them blind. The bully pulpit is there, but it needs a man to step up to the microphone (wheel up in the case of FDR). Instead of a man, we have a rabbit in the White House.
That may be, but I’d rather him channel FDR:
Look at the polling: Unemployment is the highest, and the deficit is also high. Voters are fickle, don’t know the details, and frankly don’t know jack about Macro 101; even Uncle Milty would support stimulus spending.
i think you’re right on that this is polling driven to go after the brown voters that went for us in 2008. i disagree with your “nothing to see here, move along” take though. for one, the fact that our policies (and you can of course argue that this is not a serious policy and not much will come of it, but this is still taking up resources and messaging that could be directed towards something else) are being driven by poorly informed independent voters is more than a little troubling. i agree with Al Giordano’s view that these independents are bandwagon voters and trying to be more like the other guy is probably the worst way to get bandwagon back on your side. it just makes us look weak and that’s a narrative that the bandwagon independents are predisposed to believe and validates their view that they were right, in Al’s analogy, to start hanging out with the Flanders’s.
What’s needed is some sort of coherent medium term strategy to win these bandwagon independents back. Pandering in the short term I don’t think will work.
It’s because they’ve done extensive polling about the exact kind of voters that went for Obama in ’08 and went for Cristie and O’Donnell in ’09 and Brown in ’10.
Really? And do they take into account that the TradMed has been cheerleading this from the day Obama took office? Or that Obama himself is a fan of the Hamilton Project(Why, I don’t know)? One last point. Why should a President do what the polls say? As we’ve seen from the health care battle, lots of people have no clue what’s in any of the bills. And aren’t jobs more important then worrying about the deficit now?
So, you are joining the chorus in equating deficit spending=jobs.
Doesn’t it matter a great deal what we spend our borrowed money on?
What is the harm in telling the American people that you are going to spend billions on jobs programs but cap spending on other government programs because you recognize the problem with running up staggering debt on the eve of the Baby Boom generation’s retirement?
What is the harm in telling the American people that you are going to spend billions on jobs programs but cap spending on other government programs because you recognize the problem with running up staggering debt on the eve of the Baby Boom generation’s retirement?
Because the Democrats never get credit for being the fiscally responsible party. Look at Clinton. It always takes a liberal to bring up his fiscal balance.
I just don’t see how something as blatantly pandering as this, which will be endlessly flamed in the media and on talk radio for the BS that it is, will do anything to convince any of these newly born-again fiscal scolds who have been polled that Obama is somehow now serious about reining in spending.
When I turn on CNN last night and see that they have Erick Erickson of RedState on there opining about what it all means, that tells you just how this whole thing is going to be portrayed in the media. The same media where all these “regular folk” in the polls will get their information spoon fed to them.
There is just no up side to doing this. I think it is a lose-lose all the way around for Obama.
yup. If they’d presented it better it might have had the desired effect. Instead, they over-sold it and panicked the base while impressing no one.
So why tell the liberal blogs about this(see Yglesias yesterday)? This isn’t going to get the base fired up. And that’s what they really need. And speaking about polling voters, you realize that Brown got about the same amount of votes as Cranky McSame did, right? So that tells you a whole lot of Obama voters stayed home.
That’s the part I wonder about too–why preview this to the liberal blogosphere?
On the other hand, I still want to hear it in the context of the actual speech as delivered by Obama. While it may tie his hands going forward, supposing the real objective is to shift significant amounts of money to education, green infrastructure and other progressive programs while reducing corn subsidies and other nefarious budget items, while freezing these progressive shifts into shiny, “responsible spending” package? I just don’t think the White House is as dumb and out of touch as people are assuming. I think there’s a political play that’s being executed here, even if it’s virtually impossible to understand right now.
Remember, too, that there are (I believe) several hundred billion dollars of stimulus spending set to kick in beginning only now that will be job oriented and will go in large part towards areas that we as progressives are especially interested in.
I say listen to the speech and then feel free to bitch if we don’t like what we hear.
Research 2000 Massachusetts Poll Results from Massachusetts:
HEALTH CARE BILL OPPONENTS THINK IT “DOESN’T GO FAR ENOUGH”
by 3 to 2 among Obama voters who voted for Brown
by 6 to 1 among Obama voters who stayed home
(18% of Obama supporters who voted supported Brown.)
VOTERS OVERWHELMINGLY SUPPORT THE PUBLIC OPTION
82% of Obama voters who voted for Brown
86% of Obama voters who stayed home
OBAMA VOTERS WANT DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLDER
57% of Brown voters say Obama “not delivering enough” on change he promised
49% to 37% among voters who stayed home
So I guess this wasn’t the poll that the Obama strategists were looking at. And they didn’t look at the poll showing union workers abandoning Coakley even after the Cadillac exception for union plans was made.
health care is a separate issue. People in Massachusetts already have it, so they weren’t motivated to pay for it for everyone else or to get it for themselves. Different polling data in this case.
yeah…these people have actually become morally repugnant to me now.
So much for moving to the left.
Seems like everthing this administration does these days-and what they don’t do-turns into a massive clusterfuck.
Since when do we have a spending freeze in the middle of a recession and 10%-really 15% unemployment?
Huh? If McCain supports it we know it has to suck for us.
One thing I’d like to see in the framing category is less embrace by progressives of the caricature of themselves as supporting government deficit spending for its own sake. The president’s advisers have leaked a plan that bears only the smallest resemblance to a true “spending freeze,” and which does not even represent a substantial change in policy from last year’s budget, but they call it a “spending freeze” and all of a sudden progressives think they’re getting Sister Souljahed.
I mean, c’mon!!
When did progressives embrace deficit spending?
What we should embrace is solid economic policy, which does call for stimulative deficit spending at the moment, but also for looking for as much cost savings as possible in areas that are not stimulative. It’s not debt that is good, it’s dollars floating in the economy that is necessary. Big difference.
Because we know it’s stupid. Even Spencer think the plan is dumb because the defense budget is off limits. How about getting that under control? This sounds like something else just to appease Versailles more than anything. And sets him up in opposition to his own party in Congress.
What did I do in my post last night.
Overton Window= put defense spending on the table so it’s not just raising taxes vs. cutting entitlements.
The progressive commentariat seems to want to try to move deficit spending and pork barrel programs from “sensible” to “popular.” That’s not Overton movement that I can believe in.
Not sensible to popular, but tell people why a certain course of action is worth it. Tell people that the TradMed is misleading them(if that’s the case). Lets face it, in this day and age, one of the job requirements of a Democratic President is salesmanship of his plans. Because whatever the plan is .. it will be misinterpreted by the TradMed.
obama called it “responsible spending” of course every progressive would rally behind that. instead he calls it “deficit reduction.” you’re right that there’s not a ton of difference, but why can’t he fight for the progressive frame vs the right wing frame? again, president’s have the ability to change the discourse and the way we talk about things. its a cop out to use the off-the-shelf right wing frames to try to win a news cycle or try to go after bandwagon independents.
Bad progressives! Bad framing!
How about this one, from, I think, “Hello Dolly”:
Money is like fertilizer. It works when you spread it around.
How about this:
Obama reiterates the desire to pass the Senate HCR through the House, then the fixes through reconciliation. Per the CBO report, the bill will lower the deficit, the end of the Bush tax cuts will lower the deficit, the freeze will lower the deficit, and the return of the Iraq forces will require less spending for DOD. Win across the board.
I read this in the paper this morning and just sighed.
It is clearly a PR move. It is too small to impress anyone or do anything.
But also when to see how small effect a freeze has once you exempt Defense and Homeland Security and of course this excludes liabilities for pensions, medicare, medicaid, SS, government employee benefits and contracts, etc., you see how fucked we really are anyway.
I guess. I’m personally fine with it, because there will not actually be much of a spending freeze.
The real problem is something Drum linked to which I think is a Rich Lowry twitter post: spending freeze, no matter how notional, is a huge ceding of rhetorical grnd by WH. will give GOP more leverage in makng anti-hcr, stim case.
This is risky. It doesn’t HAVE to end up the way Lowry thinks. If the rhetorical ground can be shifted so that it means something else, i.e. “strong on defense” is changed to mean “closing down wasteful programs and focusing money usefully” as opposed to “blank checks to DoD.”
Obama probably has the ability to do that but who knows what will happen.
ED: So I guess once again we are simply opposed. What part of framing do you think is bullshit really? All of it?
Also I don’t think it will be laughed off the front page. I think the political class is stupid enough and blind enough that the Obama Admin can play them on this one.
Thankfully, the Pentagon’s budget won’t even be cut, frozen, or anything like that. I mean, hell, we have al Qaeda and terrorists to worry about. So what does that mean? Steadily increasing the DoD:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31482.html
Like I said last night. This is Obama’s “Mission to Mars” moment
Speaking of bad framing, Obama needs to stop reinforcing Republican memes, unless his intent is to resusitate a brand that was almost out of business after last November.
voters. They’ll hear that Obama wants to freeze or cut spending. That will be enough to offset the usual GOP attacks of tax and spend liberals raising the deficit. I think it is a smart political play that will cut-off a line of attack from the GOP.
On a policy basis, it is just window dressing.
Bullshit.
Now the narrative will be why all domestic discretionary spending cannot be frozen, and why entitlement spending cannot be frozen, instead of asking how Obama can actually stimulate the economy.
His entire agenda just died. The GOP will go out on the Sunday shows and say “If this President was serious about a spending freeze, he would kill his agenda. He’s a hypocrite and a liar.”
The Village will agree.
And so will the swing voters in the middle.
I just saw something earlier today that said such a thing was basically a myth. True swing voters make up a very small part of the electorate.
Just wondering, what is the definition of a “true swing voter” anyway?
I’ve voted for Republicans before. Not very often, but I have. Does that make me “a swing voter”? How often do you need to cross your traditional party lines to be considered one? Many people who are not registered as a D or and R will vote mostly for one party. But not always. Are they “swing voters”?
I’m just not too clear on the exact makeup this mysterious and elusive entity that all of the politicians keep chasing.
I don’t know .. the thing didn’t say .. and I forgot where I saw it now … ugh!
Your browser History can be your friend for things like this. I find it to be a helpful trail of breadcrumbs on the occasion when I lose track of things I can’t seem to find again.
“So, in the arena of public opinion making, this proposal is indefensible and will be rightly ridiculed by all sides. It’s only virtue is its unseriousness, and that is no virtue at all.”
So he should go bigger? Maybe 10%? 20%? Give progressives something to really criticize and Republicans nothing to criticize. Win/Win!
The more I look at this, the more it seems like this is the PAY side of the PAYGO approach to whatever jobs strategy he is going to announce.
It doesn’t start taking effect until 2011 (unless Congress really does deliver the FY 2011 appropriations before December 31, 2010. It starts small and builds up, and in that respect will put a damper on whatever inflation might appear as the economy recovers (since unless lightning strikes, Ben Bernanke will still head the Fed). If it succeeds in getting rid of some really poor programs, it might prove its worth in the long term by releasing funds to better programs. According to Jared Bernstein, the Recovery Act and any jobs programs will not be a part of it.
At best it is a budgeting philosophy for this years’ budget, which Congress can (will) choose to ignore. At worst it is transparent pandering to the deficit hawks (most likely Conrad and Bayh, among others). Being transparent it will flop even as pandering.
It’s not going to “move the Overton window” because among the general public the Overton window has alread moved left, not right.
In fact, what will bring down the deficit is higher wage jobs, full employment, more progressive taxation, ending two wars, squeezing the phenomenal waste out of the national security departments and agencies, closing the Medicare Part D doughnut hole, and bringing down Medicare and Federal employee health insurance costs. All told, there is probably half a trillion dollars saving a year over all of that. And restoring surpluses will then bring down the interest on the national debt in the sort of virtual cycle that Bush squandered.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more speculation that this is part of the price for some of the wavering self-declared deficit hawks — like Bayh and Conrad — to get over their objections to health care reform. Everyone has assumed that the idea is to appeal to the public. What about appealing to some of these potentially wayward center-right politicians?
Bad politics, Meaningless Policy and Awful roll out. The Administration is boxing themselves in and the media/GOP is going to happily exploit this issue on their turf. A good football analogy is for a team to kick both halves even though you do not have to.
Sorry Booman, this is not the DFH’s fault and their reaction is mainly about our leader knee capping us in the narrative battle against GOP and media. I agree with all of your points in the earlier posts.
How the hell do you sell this policy and explain to your relatives or friends that do not follow politics closely? It is hard to be advocate when the policy does not make sense whatsoever.
I hate the tactics of the Firebaggers and I understand the negative affect that over bitching of our team does but man, this Administration is making so many bad moves that it is hard to be all “rah, rah.”
How the hell do you sell this policy and explain to your relatives or friends that do not follow politics closely?
I feel your pain. It’s getting a little tougher every day to do that. My poor wife is forced to follow politics, to a degree, just because she is married to me. Sometimes she just kind of shakes her head when she watches me get all worked up. She asked me last night what I thought about all this. All I could do was manage a smirk and an, “I think it’s stupid” comment.
My conservative friends are loving this. It’s hard to sell a turd, no matter how pretty a bow you put on it.
I have to sell more war in Afghanistan, explain how the filibuster concept is impeding action, discuss how the Stimulus helped but was not big enough, and defend the water downed Health Care Reform, which will consist of forcing people to buy Insurance from companies that have been screwing them over. It is a tall order to simply sell to educated folk who are looking to someone that follows politics to explain to them. This is after I go on rants about the scum at Goldman Sachs/Wall St and normal people understand this part because the scam banks to do them with credit cards.
Plus, they do know that Obama promised sweeping change and to fix the economy.
Plum Line explains how I feel about the WH’s moves to shift debate to GOP friendly turf.
Obama is one of the most gifted public communicators in decades. His campaign was premised on the idea that liberals needn’t shy away from arguments with the right or cede them any rhetorical turf. For this reason, each time Obama does cede rhetorical ground on this or that issue, liberals see Obama engaging in a larger capitulation. He seems to be giving up on his own potential for persuasion.
Obama, a student of history, is probably wary of shifting public attitudes too quickly or recklessly. And Obama defenders will point out that he’s always been a pragmatist. But fairly or not, liberals saw in him someone who would use his extraordinary communications skills to expand the field of what’s pragmatically possible, to move public opinion — not someone who would ever play by the other side’s rhetorical rules. Each time he falls short of this ideal, people grow less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Hence the outcry about the freeze — even if the details of the freeze are proving less onerous than initially thought.
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/health-care/failing-to-change-the-way-people-think/