I’m tired of Drew Westen’s act. He’s little more than a professional nitpicker. And he’s not a good nitpicker. In attempting to explain how President Obama might conceivably lose his bid for reelection, Westen lists three main causes. First, he tried to work with Republicans. Second the stimulus act of 2009 was not big enough. Third, the health care bill didn’t have a public option and was too phased-in.
Do we really have to refight the stimulus battle over and over again? It passed the Senate with 61 votes, with only Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter supporting it among Republicans. The vote would ultimately cost Specter his career, as he defected to the Democrats in a desperate last-ditch effort to survive. The uniform opposition of the Republicans was shocking considering that the economy was shedding 700,000 jobs a month and they were completely responsible. But, as the New York Times reported in March of 2010, the GOP had a plan:
Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation.
Total obstruction was part of the plan from the beginning. More evidence for this comes from Robert Draper’s book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives. Draper describes a meeting on inauguration day where Frank Luntz, Newt Gingrich, and several House and Senate Republicans plotted their strategy to destroy the Obama presidency.
Despite these facts, Mr. Westen puts all the blame for the failure of bipartisanship on the president. He puts all the blame for the size of the Stimulus on the president. And when it comes to health care, Weston just pretends that Democrats like Finance Chairman Max Baucus and turncoats like Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman didn’t exist.
If you want to bitch about the president’s performance in office, that’s your right. But don’t try to rewrite history. If the president is vulnerable, there are three different reasons why. First, the Republicans destroyed the economy and then ensured that the president would not have any tools at his disposal to fix it. Second, the Supreme Court legalized billionaire-bribery. Third, the right-wing has a vast media empire whose members serve as more of an auxiliary to the GOP than as corporations or normal news outlets.
Probably the most boring political writing I see is analysis that gives the GOP no credit for being good at what they do.
This is the same old argument. The only disagreement is if the president can affect what is possible.
If he can’t, and his power is limited to implementing the possible to the best of his ability, or if she can, and her power extends into the realm of expanding what is politically viable.
(shrug) firebaggers gonna firebag.
May as well ask a rock to not fall, or a snake to not bite. It’s just what they DO.
If this Drew Weston person thought, in January 2009, that it was “unthinkable” that the conservative opposition would be able to mount a strong challenge to the President who took over at the beginning of the biggest recession since the Great Depression, then that’s all I need to know about the value of his political insight.
The argument about the size of the stimulus is particularly risible. Even if we are to assume that there was “money left on the table,” we’re not talking about a stimulus is 2X larger, or even 50% larger. Being very liberal in our assumptions, maybe we could be talking about a stimulus that is 1/3 larger. Let’s make it even bigger than that, and say that it was possible to pass a $1.1 trillion stimulus, if only the first black president in American history had Drew Weston’s political skills.
That would still mean an extra $100 billion per year, in a $15.2 trillion economy. That comes out to 0.66% of annual GDP. What’s that going to mean for unemployment? Again being extremely (in this case, absurdly) liberal, let’s say that boost to the economy lowered unemployment by 0.1% below what we’ve actually seen.
Does anyone out there think that the state of the Presidential race would be meaningfully different at 8.1% instead of 8.2%?
I share the frustration of Westen and many progressives on all three issues. And I do fault Obama and his administration (particularly Tim Geithner) for, on issues they could control, consistently looking out for the interests of Wall Street at the expense of everyone else.
But that’s not what Westen is saying. In each case he’s faulting Obama for looking over the political landscape and trying to get what he felt he could, rather than being ideologically pure and getting nothing. That argument is as divorced from reality as anything the Teahadists have ever come up with.
Arguments like this are a significant part of the reason why progressives have so little power in DC. They’re tactically idiotic, lazy, and at least in this regard, stupid and obtuse. Rather than working long-term to change the composition of Congress and of the DC octopus of regulatory agencies and policy mills, they’d rather bitch that their latest anointed savior couldn’t wave his or her magic wand and make it all better – or didn’t bend to the will of the three percent or so of the average electorate who identifies as progressive.
If they took a fraction of the energy they spent complaining and instead did some serious organizing among the huge swath of Americans who agree with them on issues, they’d get a lot farther. As is, the kvetching is just tiresome.
Tiresome and boring.
I think you’re mischaracterizing Westen’s point. He’s talking about perceptions, not history. I dislike his concern-trolling framing, but he’s not shilling for Romney unless he’s very, very clever.
There are good arguments that Obama did the best he possibly could in the real political world on all three of the “mistakes” Willard claims he made. Calling them mistakes assumes that he was in a position to do whatever he wanted.
Nonetheless, from the voter perception angle, Westen’s observations are not off the charts. On the first point, I agree that Obama spent way too much capital fanning his hopeless obsession with the “bipartisan” bullshit. It endeared him to no one who mattered and just made him look squishy to the rest, including much of his own base.
On points 2 and 3, Obama was probably just being realistic about the size of the stimulus and the compromised-to-deal healthcare bill. But from the voter perspective standpoint, he didn’t stand up and fight for the best, for the dream bill, ever. He started with compromise, and when he got it on the health bill, as Westen claims, “The White House could have counterpunched, but instead it dropped its gloves.” The administration failed badly at communicating the enormous benefits that even the weak healthcare law offered to American families.
You’re of course right about all the GOP advantages and nation-busting strategies that the GOP unleashed. That doesn’t change the clear reality that Obama for whatever reason chose to play the negotiator instead of the visionary, and from that mistake all the rest follow. Those who search the record know Obama overcame huge obstacles to do some great things. Too bad he doesn’t act like it. The good part is, there’s still time, and he seems ready for the fight.
Slightly off-topic, but Westen is exactly the kind of liberal that labor and community organizers have in mind when they speak disdainfully of liberals.
(And, even though the current occupant of the White House had only a brief career as an organizer, I strongly suspect that’s what he thinks too.)
I agree that Obama spent way too much capital fanning his hopeless obsession with the “bipartisan” bullshit. It endeared him to no one who mattered and just made him look squishy to the rest, including much of his own base.
On the other hand, the big show of bipartisan sentiment got him the votes of people like Lierberman, Baucus, and Landrieu on his big first-two-years legislative agenda. Max Baucus may have kept the health care bill in his committee for a zillion years in an unsuccessful effort to get Republicans, but Obama and Reid let him keep it there, in a successful effort to get Max Baucus.
Westen is indeed tiresome, as he lives in the ‘ where’s my unicorn’ land
Have you guys figure out a way to blame the pro-banker, anti-homeowner HAMP implementation on the GOP or the filibuster or Lieberman yet?
I know, I know … Lily Ledbetter, etc.
Huh?
It’s some sort of code that only the Initiated can decipher.
Sibboleth! Dammit, S-s-s-sibboleth!
S-s-s-s-s-SIB-o-leth!
Dammit!
Obama was in charge of HAMP without any of Congress’s bullshit, and it was a massive failure.
Well, here’s the thing… if Obama loses he will be forever cast as a failure. It won’t matter that it’s not true or that the Republicans screwed the public with their obstruction. If he gets re-elected he will get the chance to preside over an eventual economic turnaround and cement a positive legacy. Fail and he’s Jimmy Carter.