Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama’

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No More Mister Nice Guy

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

President Obama’s speech last week marked a significant departure from his approach to governance during his first year in office.

In his speech today in the White House East Room, President Obama clearly indicated that he is going to press for a comprehensive, and not a piecemeal or “skinny,” health care reform bill. He also made it abundantly clear that he will accept, if necessary, a party-line simple majority vote in the House and the Senate in order to get the bill through. Reconciliation here we come.

During his campaign and throughout year one, Obama promised to “change the way Washington works” and emphasized bipartisanship, especially during the debate over health care reform. Apparently, he believed that if he just tried hard enough to get Republicans on board, some of them would work with him to solve our problems.

But no more. As John Judis writes:

But it is now evident that Obama’s approach was what he understood about American politics—it was the guiding light gleaned from his years as an Illinois state senator—and he planned to apply it to Congress. And it was, of course, nonsense. Republicans were able to use Obama’s naiveté about their motives to undermine his initiatives. As Noam Scheiber explains in his profile of Rahm Emanuel, the principal obstacle to getting health care reform through Congress last year was Obama’s dogged insistence last summer that Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus continue to plug away at nailing down a bipartisan agreement. What Obama got was not an amicable agreement but a summer of discontent, highlighted by Senator Charles Grassley’s  denunciation of Democratic “death panels” and by the emergence of the Tea Party movement.

But it’s not an easy job being president. It took Bill Clinton most of his first term to figure out how to do domestic and foreign policy. Like Clinton, Obama has stumbled, but his slip-ups have been more dramatic because, with the economy cratering and two wars raging, the stakes have been higher from the first.

However, in Obama’s speech today, and in his artful performance at the health care summit last week, he showed that he has learned something from his first year in office. Obama is now using the rhetoric of bipartisanship as Schmitt and other liberals thought he was doing in 2008: He is using it to paint Republicans as intransigent. He clearly no longer believes that a bipartisan agreement on health care is possible.

The challenges are still daunting:

How to frame government initiatives in a way that acknowledges but also overcomes American anti-statism has been, and remains, a major political challenge for Democrats. But in beginning to draw clear distinctions between the Democratic and Republican approaches, Obama has taken the first important step toward meeting that challenge.

It will be difficult to succeed in a country that is reflexively anti-government. Judis is guardedly optimistic.

I am a bit less so.

It may be that American voters are so profoundly delusional that there is little Obama (or anyone else) can do to rescue us from the ignorant tirades of tea partiers, global warming denialists, and free market fanatics.

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2009: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

2009 began with great promise: the exit of the criminal gang that had been running Washington for 8 years, and the emergence of a new administration full of hope and committed to tackling the substantial problems we face as a nation.

That promise has been in part fulfilled.

The Obama Administration prevented a depression, put an end to the arrogant posturing and jingoism that threatened our our global standing and moral authority in the world, and is on the brink of passing health care reform, which despite its flaws, is the most important addition to our safety net in nearly 50 years. Furthermore, the Administration has made countless regulatory decisions on the environment, banking, and judicial reform that, while falling far short of what is needed, have brought the idea of competent governance back to Washington.

By any measure, this was a good year for progressive politics.

Of course, the new administration took over in the midst of a deep economic recession and the threatened collapse of the global financial system. Although, the collapse was averted due, in part, to the Obama administration’s timely and forceful actions, unemployment skyrocketed, trillions of dollars of wealth vanished eviscerating the life savings of many ordinary Americans, and we held our nose while Wall St. bankers were rewarded for their incompetence and greed.

The economic prospects of Americans have taken a severe body blow, especially in California, where the Yacht Party continues to plunder our human resources, presiding over the collapse of the educational system that is the lifeblood of any modern society.

By any measure this was a bad year for the American Dream, which one year of progressive politics cannot restore.

As for the ugly, well, nothing is uglier than the rampant cynicism that grips large swaths of the American public, exacerbated by the ignorant know-nothings who call themselves “conservatives” and the impatient utopians on the left.

On the right, the inmates now run the asylum. The Republican Party is the party of “birthers” raging hysterically about “death panels” and “enemies lists” and spouting wild-eyed nonsense about ACORN and Obama’s re-education camps. It is a party in which the leadership honestly thinks a spending freeze is the solution to our economic crisis, compares Obama to the leaders of Nazi Germany, and openly threatens to encourage states to nullify Federal laws or secede from the union.

On the left, fuming perfectionists threaten never to vote again because of some compromise of principle perpetrated by the allegedly weak-willed Obama. Their belief in the magical powers of the President would be touching in a six year old, but is mere hypocrisy for someone claiming to be part of the reality-based community.

The world is a saner and safer place today than it was a year ago. We should be thankful for that while mindful of the real misery wrought by decades of conservative ideology.

 

 

 

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Professor in Chief

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

I can’t imagine George W. Bush giving an explanation like this.

Via Brad Delong, this is an excerpt from the Q and A with President Obama after the recent jobs summit:

ROBERT KUTTNER: You know, most of the things that have been proposed today cost money, and there is this concern about the federal deficit. I hope that your administration will recognize, as I know you will, that it’s possible, first of all, to reduce the deficit over time and sometimes in the short run realize that you need to increase the deficit. And I hope the concern about the deficit in the long run doesn’t crowd out the need for additional spending in the short run. And I also think that some of these programs that increase jobs and increase GDP are probably the fastest way to get the economy back on a track that will reduce the deficit over time. It’s certainly a better way to reduce the deficit than putting ourselves into a — into a debtor’s prison and assume we can deflate our way to recovery.

BARACK OBAMA: Well, I think this is an important point. You know, we’ve been talking a lot about specific initiatives. There is a macroeconomic element to this whole thing. And so let me just amplify what was just said.

We have a structural deficit that is real and growing, apart from the financial crisis. We inherited it. We’re spending about 23 percent of GDP and we take in 18 percent of GDP and that gap is growing because health care costs, Medicare and Medicaid in particular, are growing. And we’ve got to do something about that.

You then layer on top of that the huge loss of tax revenue as a consequence of the financial crisis and the greater demands for unemployment insurance and so forth. That’s another layer. Probably the smallest layer is actually what we did in terms of the Recovery Act. I mean, I think there’s a misperception out there that somehow the Recovery Act caused these deficits.

No, I mean, we had — we’ve got a 9-point-something trillion- dollar deficit, maybe a trillion dollars of it can be attributed to both the Recovery Act as well as the cleanup work that we had to do in terms of the banks. In turns out actually TARP, as wildly unpopular as it has been, has been much cheaper than any of us anticipated.

So that’s not what’s contributing to the deficit. We’ve got a long- term structural deficit that is primarily being driven by health care costs, and our long-term entitlement programs. All right? So that’s the baseline.

Now, if we can’t grow our economy, then it is going to be that much harder for us to reduce the deficit. The single most important thing we could do right now for deficit reduction is to spark strong economic growth, which means that people who’ve got jobs are paying taxes and businesses that are making profits have taxes — are paying taxes. That’s the most important thing we can do.

We understand that in this administration. That’s not always the dialogue that’s going on out there in public and we’re going to have to do a better job of educating the public on that.

The last thing we would want to do in the midst of what is a weak recovery is us to essentially take more money out of the system either by raising taxes or by drastically slashing spending. And frankly, because state and local governments generally don’t have the capacity to engage in deficit spending, some of that obligation falls on the federal government.

Having said that, what is also true is that unless businesses and global capital markets have some sense that we’ve got a plan, medium and long term, to get the deficit down, it’s hard for us to be credible, and that also could be counterproductive. So we’ve got about as difficult a economic play as is possible, which is to press the accelerator in terms of job growth, but then know when to apply the brakes in the out-years and do that credibly. And you know, we are trying to strike that balance, but we’re going to need help from all of you who oftentimes are more credible than politicians in delivering that message.

Because we want to leverage whatever public dollars are spent, and we are under no illusion that somehow the federal government can spend its way out of this recession. But it is absolutely true that any of the ideas that have been — been mentioned here are still going to require some public dollars, and those are actually good investments to make right now.

I am not an economist but I feel like I know more about economics after reading this. What a difference an election makes.

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