Personally, I think pork is an important part of the legislative process. When combined with transparency, pork gives Congressional leaders something of value to offer a lawmaker who doesn’t want to support a particular bill. During the lead-up to and aftermath of the vote on the Affordable Care Act, the Cornhusker Kickback showed both sides of the coin. Majority Leader Harry Reid needed Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska’s vote, but Sen. Nelson had no electoral incentive to support ObamaCare. So, inducements were provided. Concessions were made. And Nebraska had the federal government agree to pick up (in perpetuity) 100% of the tab for the Medicaid expansion in the bill. That sweet deal, along with painful concessions on the abortion language, was enough to win Nelson’s vote and pass the bill.
Yet, as soon as the details of the deal were revealed, it became a scandal. Rather than boasting that he had won an awesome concession for his home state, Sen. Nelson denied he had asked for the concession in the first place. Then the whole deal was eliminated in the budget reconciliation part of the health care reforms. The lesson isn’t that pork or special treatment are bad, but that you have to be a good judge of the politics. Ultimately, the people were more offended that Nebraska was treated differently than most of the other states than they were impressed with Nelson’s hardball negotiating tactics. In some other situation, saving an Air Force base for example, the people might actually reward Nelson for his savvy.
Pork and other special treatment can create suboptimal allocations of resources, and its unfair almost by definition. But a legislature needs ways to grease the skids so that they can actually get things done. As long as things are transparent, people can fairly judge why their representative has voted the way that they have, and they can punish or reward them accordingly.
This is just one more example of how John McCain is wrong about everything.
Which brings me to Mitch McConnell and the Republicans’ refusal to entertain any jobs proposals from the president. Historically, presidents have been able to rely on a couple of things to win sufficient support from the opposition to pass bills that address the urgent needs of the country. For most of the postwar period, there was enough ideological overlap and lack of party unity that most issues didn’t neatly line up along party lines. That’s no longer the case. The GOP is united in opposition for opposition’s sake. The New York Times reported on this in March 2010.
On the major issues — not just health care, but financial regulation and the economic stimulus package, among others — Mr. McConnell has held Republican defections to somewhere between minimal and nonexistent, allowing him to slow the Democratic agenda if not defeat aspects of it. He has helped energize the Republican base, expose divisions among Democrats and turn the health care fight into a test of the Democrats’ ability to govern.
“It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out,” Mr. McConnell said about the health legislation in an interview, suggesting that even minimal Republican support could sway the public. “It’s either bipartisan or it isn’t.”
Mr. McConnell said the unity was essential in dealing with Democrats on “things like the budget, national security and then ultimately, obviously, health care.”
In the past, the way to deal with such obstruction would have been to attack the most vulnerable members of the opposition. However, President Obama has been operating under some daunting circumstances in that regard. Of the twelve incumbent Republican senators who sought reelection in 2010, only one (Chuck Grassley of Iowa) represented a state that Obama won during the 2008 elections. Of the remaining eleven, two (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bob Bennett of Utah) were challenged and defeated in the primaries by Tea Party candidates. Murkowski managed to win reelection as an independent, while Bennett’s career was over. The problem, for Obama, was that Republican senators had much more to fear from cooperating with him than by opposing him. He did, however, have success in flipping Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to the Democratic Party, where he supplied vital support in the 111th Congress.
Things are no better this year. There are only eight incumbent Republican senators seeking reelection, compared to 17 Democratic incumbents. Of those eight, four come from states that Obama carried in 2008 (Richard Lugar of Indiana, Dean Heller of Nevada, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Scott Brown of Massachusetts). The president has been able to get some support from Lugar, Snowe, and Brown on various issues. Sen. Heller is new to the Senate, but has so far shown no sign of fearing the president more than the rabid base of his party. Sens. Lugar and Snowe will almost definitely have difficult primary challenges from their right, which places them in a difficult spot. Right now, only Scott Brown seems to be in the classic position of feeling the need to work with a president of the opposite party or risk losing his seat.
It’s this lack of leverage that has plagued the White House for the last two and a half years. And it’s made even worse by another factor. The obvious solution to a situation like this is to go to the people and convince them of the correctness of your policies and plans. Obama has done that. The people agree with him on pretty much everything he is saying about jobs, spending, and taxes. The problem is that the Republicans don’t care. In the House, at least, many of these Republicans are vulnerable next fall. They are going to pay a price for screwing up our credit rating and refusing to compromise on anything. But they don’t care. That’s the final piece of the problem. The House Republicans have no sense of self-preservation. Their leaders will take them right over a cliff, and they’ll go along like lemmings.
It was possible to overcome some of this when the Democrats had 59 (and, briefly, 60) senators. With 53 senators, nothing can be done. That the Republicans now own the House is almost irrelevant, although it means we can’t even have votes for our priorities.
This is why Washington is broken. It is concerted obstruction, a lack of accountability in the undemocratic Senate, and a lack of any sense of self-preservation among House Republicans. The result is that Republicans don’t care what the public thinks or wants.
And this is why. Career Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren explains:
“A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption,” he wrote. “Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.”
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
One final note. When FDR passed Social Security his party controlled 75 Senate seats out of a total of 96. When LBJ passed Medicare, his party controlled 68 out of 100 seats. Asking Obama to deliver the same kind of major progressive reforms when his party doesn’t have a supermajority is not realistic. He has 53 votes and a determined and implacable opposition. Just sayin’.
I have to disagree that the absence of earmarks and pork is the problem. It comes down to this assertion:
Nelson’s incentives weren’t electoral, they were professional. He was an ex-executive of an insurance company with strong ties to his old industry. The electoral elements did not enter into his decision to oppose healthcare reform. But might have in his attempt to lower the state’s Medicaid budget. He backtracked because the publicity about the deal exposed the fact to his industry that he could be bought by someone else.
The problem the Republican Party has now is that they can’t bring home pork to just their citizens and will not bring benefits to all Americans — because of their governing philosophy that government is not the solution, it’s the problem. But they still can earmark industries – yes to fossil fuels, no to alternative energy – in general legislation. And those earmarks can be delivered as tax cuts. So trading can still go on between the industries concentrated in various geographical locations.
The currency of Congress has ceased to be spending and is now tax cuts. The trading is between the constituencies that receive those tax cuts. The pork in visible on the table, but because it is tax cuts, it is considered laudable.
The play is not for the electorate. The electorate has ceased to pay attention to any great extent except the five minutes before an election. The play is for the sources of campaign funds. The kabuki is to hide this from the public when they do occasionally tune in.
In any system that allocates benefits (or punishments), patronage and pork never disappear. And the only thing that keeps them at bay are frequent rules changes. Which then becomes the new game.
Nothing gets done in Congress primarily because the bulk of the electorate is too busy surviving to pay attention and demand that something be done. And because the five-minutes before going into the voting booth usually exposes them to loud demands of the media and political advertising that doing anything is too risky.
Voters have gotten what they have voted for but not what they wanted because the folks who drive saturation political advertising and hijacked rationality and got the voters to vote for what the funders wanted.
Great comments- so why didn’t Obama use any political capital to push for institutional reform? The mantra of his campaign was “change” and yet he did nothing to actually enact institutional reform that would change the rules of the game. Could he have done much? Probably not, but he could have moved the ball somewhat further down the road in voter registration, campaign finance, Senate rule reform, labor laws, etc. There isn’t a lot of glory in these big picture type reforms, but its been the bread and butter for the GOP in the last 30 years and its culminating with them poised to take over almost all political institutions in this country in 2012, only 4 years after the party being in complete shambles.
Voter registration issues are primarily being handled by DOJ as we speak. Actions against Alabama and Arizona’s new laws—and likely against other states.
Campaign finance reform is dead until the Supreme Court changes. He made two good appointments in that direction, with Sotomayor raising the very basis of corporate personhood.
Labor laws — Lilly Ledbetter, increase in minimum wage, and others. And more active enforcement of existing laws in Hilda Solis’s Department of Labor.
Strengthening NLRB through appointment so that the GOP is threatening to have their appointees resign to stop the board in its tracks. And the State of South Carolina filing suit against the NLRB.
Reforms of Congressional process require Congressional caucus action. Presidents really have little influence over these jealously guarded prerogatives. And that political capital would be expended confidentially instead of publicly–for the sake of party unity.
The GOP is still in a shambles. They have benefitted from the media wanting a comeback story and from the astro-turfed Tea Party movement playing for them the same role the progressive movement played for Democrats (thought dead) in the runup to 2006. Boehner does not have control of his caucus; Eric Cantor is undercutting him at every opportunity. Wall Street is beginning to get scared about the economy.
Obama cannot effective spend political capital if he gets too far ahead of the center of gravity of opinion of the American people. And that center is not the “center” most folks place on an ideological spectrum. It is more complex than ideology. The American people now are appalled that the GOP would push the government into default.
As for 2012, the future is completely and utterly open in a way it hasn’t been in decades. It is equally likely that Democrats take over two of the three branches of government as the GOP takes over all of them. That is because there is so much in play between now and January when the campaigns start in earnest. And the Republican field for president is nowhere settled yet and could see the entry of Chris Christie or someone else before it gets thinned out.
All great points Boo, but do you agree, more or less, with how the White House has handled these political obstacles, most of which were apparent, at least to seasoned political advisers like the ones Obama was listening to, since January 2009 or earlier?
I believe Obama’s post-partisan approach to politics, his decision to go small on the stimulus, his pivot to austerity when the economy was shaky at best, his decision to let Baucus pursue for months his delusional fantasy of bipartisanship while Grassley was embracing tea party rhetoric, his failure to nominate a new Fed Chairmen, his failure to nominate empty fed seats, all these things made these obstacles even greater, basically he did himself no favors, and in many cases, made the situation worse.
Its taken for granted that Dem senators are allowed to threaten to filibuster their President and party’s agenda, but McConnell controls all of the procedural votes of his caucus? Why weren’t attempts made to replicate the tactics and strategies that McConnel used to control his caucus?
You’re preaching to the choir Booman- we get it- change is hard, politics is hard, the GOP are a well financed, disciplined political juggernaut right now. But given the failures of Obama’s political team, its not too much to expect changes at the top. Failure to put in place advisers who grasp these challenges and have a plan to do something about it after the mid-terms was inexcusable.
Finally, on your last point, progressives are way past hoping that Obama deliver progressive reforms like FDR and LBJ; at this point we just want him not to be so inept at the political game that he doesn’t give away the country to Rick Perry, a fully stacked judiciary, and control of both houses. Then its game over for the American experiment.
The statement that the president “decided to go small on the stimulus” is pretty hard to swallow.
I don’t even want to explain why that’s bullshit. It’s just bullshit because it fails to understand what the word ‘choice’ means.
I think he should have been more aggressive on the empty Fed seats and a new Fed chairman would have been nice.
As for “embracing austerity.” this, too, is not a choice. It’s a result of the midterm elections.
The biggest single problem Obama has faced is that the hole in the economy was too big for him to fill. Even in retrospect, there was nothing he could have done that would have avoided a prolonged period of high unemployment.
The second biggest problem, you identified. Max Baucus dragged his feet at a time when we could not afford to get to August 2009 without a bill passed. That not only weakened the final product, but it lost us 6 months for other things, and it chewed up the entire 4 months when we had 60 votes. We never recovered.
Thanks for response. To your point on the stimulus being too small, I get the political constraints- but why not get creative and build in automatic stabilizers in the stimulus bill, like payroll tax cuts or additional infrastructure spending, if unemployment continued to climb? And agreed, most didn’t grasp how bad this was going to be, which made it hard to enact policy solutions to meet such a scale. But probably the most prominent economist in the country, Paul Krugman, certainly did. Either Obama and his team lacked creativity on how to tackle the problem given its scale, or they just thought Krugman was an idiot. Either way, seems to me the appropriate response of any good-faith leader is to fire those people who either couldn’t devise creative policy solution or who thought Krugman was an idiot. Seems like the exact opposite happened- people like Romer are gone and Geitner is more powerful than ever.
It didn’t matter what Krugman said. Krugman underestimated the size of hole, too. What he called for was politically impossible, and even that wasn’t enough. You should read Jared Bernstein on the subject of the stimulus, because he’s honest and informative about it.
So now you are calling Krugman a liar? You really are Jekyll and Hyde.
I didn’t call him a liar at all.
I said Krugman didn’t accurately project how big a hole had been blown in the economy and what he recommended would have been inadequate.
At least he knew at the outset that the stimulus that passed was woefully inadequate. What I find more amazing is that despite more computing power, and otherwise computerized lives(meaning all the information that’s out there) that it took them three years to figure out the hole was deeper than they realized. Just imagine if North Korea invaded the South and we thought they only had 500,000 troops, and it took them 3 years to find out they had more like 2 million.
I understand your point CJ, but you’re setting up a false equivalency. Counting the number of troops is a relatively easy computation because there’s only one thing to do – count the troops. The economy is a far more complicated beast, with factors upon factors to consider that all affect each other in different and sometimes unpredictable ways.
If you want to go forward with your analogy, a more apt way to put it would be:
Just imagine if North Korea invaded the South and, given that the North Korean troops consume Cherry Jolly Ranchers on average once per week, and shower once every two weeks using Pert Plus shampoo (no soap), and watched ‘Dancing with the Stars’ for an average of 27 minutes per week (but not in February [ and 43% sit on couches, while 57% stand]), we thought that 5,000 of them would have had pimples on their asses, but then 3 years later found that in fact 15,000 of them do. But, since some may have used an astringent, we don’t actually know how many of them may have had ass acne as recently as two weeks ago.
Obama’s pivot to austerity only happened after the Republicans took the House. There was no way anything progressive was going to pass after that. Everything austerity-related since then is purely political. I agree with pretty much everything else you said.
I like Obama on a personal level. I just feel now that his Presidency came just a little early. Post-2008 the conservative brand should have been in the mud. Instead they’re now rebranding their tired, failed ideas as solutions to an economic mess that they caused. He’s been unlucky but he’s also been both stubborn and timid.
I think Obama needs to go full-out class warfare populist to win this next election. A year ago I would have said he was going to win re-election easily. But the Republicans aren’t going to mail it in and economic discontent could be enough to blind people to the radicalism on the right.
Actually, it was Joe Lieberman and Democrats who forced the pivot to austerity. Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, Dianne Feinstein, Kent Conrad, and Mark Warner held the debt ceiling increase of December 2009 hostage to get a commission on the deficit and debt. Bayh is gone to lobbying already. Lieberman and Conrad are retiring.
It is the fifth column in the Congressional caucus that has bedeviled him from the beginning.
Not sure Obama and Holy Joe really are at odds as you imply. Obama never campaigned against him in 2006 like he said he would. And he fully restored Holy Joe to his chairmanships in the Senate after he had endorsed a Republican for President. In the end, I’m not sure what Obama got in return for this, as Holy Joe betrayed Reid on the buy-in to medicate compromise that would have salvaged HCR politically.
Finally, while Obama’s rhetoric on austerity started after the midterms, he proved his worth to the creditor/banking class much earlier. His whipping for TARP votes in fall 2008 was instrumental in getting a bailout of the banks. That would have been a key time to push for a bailout that wiped out equity, forced a haircut for creditors, and replaced the incompetent and corrupt management. Barry Ritholtz at Big Picture, hardly a liberal or a progressive, has been pushing this Swedish style restructuring from the beginning. Its very telling that Obama never considered it, even though he got the template exactly right for the car company restructurings.
Do you believe Obama actually believes in enacting policies that are good for the creditor class, or is he just forced into these situations by political imperatives outside his control?
And he fully restored Holy Joe to his chairmanships in the Senate
The President did this?
Man, Reid and Durbin must be pissed!
Yes, Obama did do it. But why are people upset over it? Had he not, Joe likely would have caucused with the Republicans. He’s a vindictive bastard. In this case, I still think extending mercy was better.
The West Wing is definitely out of reality in today’s climate, but one poignant memory should be when Josh Lyman punished the Democrat from Idaho over a military spending measure. The guy switched to the Republicans, and it ended up costing the administration their bill.
“Yes, Obama did do it.”
No, he didn’t. Senate chairmanships are determined by the Senate leadership, and the branches of government jealously guard their prerogatives against each other.
Joe Lieberman wasn’t at odds with President Obama, he was extorting a Leiberman pet project out of the President. I think these five thought at the time that this would insulate them from the “tax and spend” label in the period after the appearance of the Tea Party. I take that back; this was a long-term project that Kent Conrad thought would write his place in history. For Baucus, it was a price to pay for healthcare reform. For Evan Bayh, it was retribution. And Mark Warner is just a …
The interests of the creditor class and those of the deficit hawks are different (except for Pete Peterson, who wants to be the investment manager for a privatized Social Security).
The situation at the time TARP was being considered was potentially catastrophic because the creditor class had used credit default swaps to print money beyond the reach of any government. And all of a sudden the asset base that that money was based on (it’s good faith and credit) was shown to be fraudulent (bunches of subprime mortgages that were known to become non-performing at the first adjustment of interest rates). The peer-to-peer trust within the creditor class collapsed. Had all of the credit default swaps been activated, there would have been a $100T financial hole in an global economy that is smaller than that. Bush was President. Paulson was Secretary of Treasury. Paulson’s previous employer Goldman-Sachs was deep in the thick of the problem. Two investment houses had already failed.
TARP was Paulson’s plan. And when it came to a vote, it was Paulson’s plan or nothing. And the GOP was posturing about being against a bailout, wanting to have Democrats take the rap for bailing out the banks. Some Democrats wanted to make sure that the funds didn’t go into executive bonuses, and what they got was an oversight commission (headed by Elizabeth Warren, btw). But there were Republicans and Democrats who did not understand nor appreciate that the crisis was indeed real. Which is why Obama (in the midst of a Presidential campaign) was whipping votes for the compromise (including and oversight commission) measure.
The Swedish type of restructuring was no considered at the time because to Congress, it was, well, Swedish.
So Obama took office with the first tranche of TARP having already been loaned to the banks and with Bernanke (a Republican btw) loaning reserves like crazy to allow banks to make good on as many CDS agreements as were in danger.
The banking industry started to stabilize. The banks issued their yearly bonuses and created a public firestorm over TARP. Legislation was introduced in Congress to pull back the bonuses paid out of TARP funds, but money being fungible and to special accounting rules having been set up, those bills made it nowhere in part because of Chris Dodd, chair of the Senate Banking Committee.
Half of the TARP funds remained. There was a public debate in which economists like Ritholtz, Krugman, and DeLong argued for a Swedish-style resolution process for too-big-to-fail banks. The government did take ownership of AIG, which was a resolution process for that insurance company because it had been made so insolvent by its issuance of so many credit default swaps. So some Swedish-style resolution occurred. It is not clear that this was not considered for too-big-to-fail banks as well, but it was not considered publicly.
There are some differences between Swedish banking and US banking that would make that type of resolution difficult—but not impossible. As it was FDIC was hiring bank examiners as fast as they could and dispatching them to the many community banks that were failing, banks with one facility or a few branch banks.
The sheer logistical problem of hiring and dispatching to every BoA, Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Wachovia, SunTrust or other bank nationwide would be huge. And the resolution process which would have been much like that done on savings and loans during the Poppy Bush administration would have been complex–just tracking down the counterbalancing accounts among all of the banks. (One bank’s debit is another bank’s credit.) And netting what was left in losses. Restructuring the automobile companies themselves did not have that complexity and there was a greater return quickly because of the recovery effects in the supplier and dealer networks.
The Geithner stress test were a triaged form that sort of resolution.
And part of the remaining TARP funds were loaned to bail out GM and Chrysler.
Almost all of the TARP funds have been repaid. There is transparency in reporting on where that stands.
The loans of federal reserves amounted to a reprorted $1.8T, based on the audit required by the Dodd-Frank bill. Those loans get paid the same way any other loans from Fed reserves get paid. Loaning $1.8T that wasn’t from the government accounts in order to prevent a $100T calamity seems reasonable to me.
The Obama administration then shepherded through Congress with the help of Elizabeth Warren a comprehensive financial industry reform act that the creditor class hates because it requires transparency. And they especially hate the Consumer Finance Protection Board at the Fed, which is operating well with its acting director Richard Cordray, who can be acting director forever without Senate confirmation. Shelby likely is not going to win that fight.
The most recent controversy involving the Obama administrator and the banks was the DoJ dropping NY Attorney General Schneidemann from the group of states attorney generals negotiating the fraud penalties with the banks. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac brought suit for fraud damages against these same banks. I’m not sure of the extent to which the President personally is involved in the decisions about these actions.
All Presidents have to deal with political imperatives. And often find that in a political system dominated by big-bucks campaign expenditures for media the necessity to be diplomatic at best with the folks who have big bucks that could fund a campaign against you.
Because of the debt ceiling negotiations in which the Republicans almost drove the government into default and financial panic (I still maintain that even if there was stalemate panic was not necessary), the creditor class are choosing their Republicans carefully. And some might be upping their bets on Democrats. The fact that Obama invites them to the White House an listens to them is part of the diplomacy.
New Deal economic policies would be very good economically for the creditor class but it would reduce their political power. But we have a creditor class too dumb to figure that out. They are satisfied with less absolute wealth and more relative wealth. It’s a status thing. Paying higher marginal tax rates, having substantial estate taxes, and other progressive fiscal policies would be very good for the investor class. And even better for the rest of us. The economy is a closed system; what goes around comes around. Hoarding never produces wealth.
I think that Obama knows this. But thirty years of Jude Wanniski’s economic nostrums for Republicans has polluted discussion of economics in public. The public’s conventional wisdom about economics is much different than it was in the 1960s when most of the middle aged people had lived through the Depression and World War II. And Obama is very careful not to get too far ahead of the thinking of the public. And careful not to antagonize Democrats in Congress. He makes choices on that basis. He is neither a free agent nor someone trapped by circumstance, and putting the question in that bipolar way of thinking doesn’t do justice to the difficulty of being a President (or a leader of anything).
Just a note, we have some practice with nationalization in 1984 when the FDIC did something along the Swedish lines. It took them seven years to sell its assets off. That wasn’t even in the $100 billion category, let alone trillion. So there’s precedent for successfully nationalizing much smaller and much simpler banks, but there’s absolutely no precedent for nationalizing a bank anywhere near the size of Citi or BofA.
In theory, it’s possible to argue that nationalization is the best solution. But in practice, there’s a 100% chance that, even if we had a legal mechanism for winding down major banks, nationalization would still be a disaster. The complexities are too great, the opportunities for mistakes too numerous, and the stakes too high for anyone to seriously believe that the government could pull the whole process off without causing substantial collateral damage.
Just think of what happened with Lehman. The bondholders were forced to take haircuts — the inevitable conclusion of any restructuring process — and it nearly brought the entire financial market down with it.
“but there’s absolutely no precedent for nationalizing a bank anywhere near the size of Citi or BofA”
And certainly not all of them at the same time.
Booman should let you blog here. Thanks for the education.
No it didn’t. He’s always been talking about it. After all, he was the only elected official that showed up at the opening of the Pete Peterson-funded Concord Coalition. I don’t give a damn who controls the House, bringing up deficit reduction now, when the economy still sucks, is a recipe for disaster.
And exactly when did he show up at the opening of the Pete Peterson-funded Concord Coalition? The Concord Coalition began operation in 1992.
It remains to be seen whether it’s a recipe for disaster or a narrative changing moment. The debt ceiling debate and mentions of cuts to Social Security woke up a bunch of voters.
From an economic perspective, you are right. Actually cutting spending when the economy sucks is a recipe for disaster. But the joint committee (that terminology so much gets it) is dealing with a ten-year budget deal. Which really is only binding to the extent that the Congress makes it binding. And then only until January 2013.
The very best case scenario for it is that it institutes some automatic stabilizers that do not put every economic up and down back up for debate in the Congress. For example, it ups taxes, especially on financial instruments, in times of inflation. And begins to get the bloat in the national security agencies under control. The national security budgets have to be seen for what they are; the GOP jobs programs. And they are spending programs. A lot of the personnel tied up in military procurement projects could better contribute to projects in the civilian sector.
Too many folks argue from the point of view that the worst case has already happened when it has not. And the political maneuvering this fall will be what shapes the 2012 election. It is going to be hardball. And confused. And infuriating.
It’s unclear to me that congressional republicans hurt their election chances by not cooperating with Obama. Yeah, polls show that congress is unpopular as a whole. But if they had cooperated, they no doubt would have been primaried by the rabid right, and they would probably have lost fund-raising sources. The pukes are good at bringing the hammer down on apostates. Being an uncooperative dickhead may be a comparative advantage in todays polarized climate.
I’m convinced that it is an advantage to be a Republican uncooperative dickhead. Their base eats it up, and the low-information voters seem not to mind.
is the frame in which this all gets done.
From 2008, Obama has gone with the bipartisan frame. That means we all work together, no one is at fault, we are all in this boat together. Total crap, but that’s his line.
The Republicans have said that Obama is a socialist, it’s all his fault, he’s to blame for everything. Again, total crap.
To the public, the math works like this:
Obama says 0 (neither R nor D)
Repubs say -10 (all Obama’s fault)
0 + (-10) / 2 = -5
Since Obama is not willing to cast any responsibility on Repubs, they won’t do it themselves. He gets the blame because he has accepted their frame.
That’s why he is probably not going to be re-elected.
Obama may not take it in a landslide, but he’ll take the election. Polls indicate anxiety at this point, not how people will vote in the moment.
Since Obama is not willing to cast any responsibility on Repubs, they won’t do it themselves. He gets the blame because he has accepted their frame.
Then why does every poll on blame for the economy place more on the Republicans than Obama?
Why does every poll on the debt ceiling impasse show that the public places more blame on the Republicans than on Obama?
Okay, so the only voice calling out the Republicans in the lead up to the 2010 elections was Obama’s, putting the blame totally and completely on them for the economy and warning people what would happen if they were put back in charge. He is the same one who more than once has called the Republican’s hostage takers.
I am getting sick and tired of people who say he never calls out the republicans.
Yes, he calls for working together, as he should. Nothing can be accomplished without some working together. He also has started going at it unilaterally. Thanks to the Republicans getting rid of earmarks, he has more say how some of the money already budgeted can be spent and he is starting to direct spending into more stimulus like spending.
The general public doesn’t do that sort of math. And the general public won’t be thinking about the 2012 election as a reality until October 2012.
What matters now is what the general public thinks needs to be done to create more jobs. I think that Obama has that down pretty good right now. But are jobs such an issue that the public will put pressure on Republicans in Congress? I don’t know. That 4.3% unemployment rate for people with bachelors degrees and above doesn’t argue for support there (and these are the middle class with the most at stake from middle class tax cuts, as meager as the cuts will be). The folks for whom unemployment is a reality tend to be the folks who either through inclination or working multiple jobs don’t tend to pay attention unless it’s something really hyped. The debt ceiling fight was really hyped by the media only because it dragged almost to the point of default. People started paying attention. Hopefully, they have continued to pay attention.
To say that Obama is not going to be re-elected requires stating who will be elected. I still see nothing but chaos in the Republican primary ranks.
I didn’t say that the math is what gets done. It is rather a representation of the conclusions people draw. If Obama is not blaming Repukes, and they are blaming him, he gets half the blame. He needs Biden out there, calling the Repukes out. This is the function of the VP.
I agree that he needs Biden and other surrogates out there and on message. And as the campaign starts going likely he will have people out there.
Judging from that speech in Detroit, that moment is coming soon.
It’s about time for his “I’m not gonna take it anymore.” moment, lightly and nicely. Remember when he was under furious attack in September and October of 2008 and he stood up on stage at a speech and mentioned the attacks and then brushed off his shoulders and gave that chuckle. That’s what a “I’m not gonna take it anymore” moment looks like with Barack Obama. But don’t expect to see that from the well of the House.