With the president on the Brink of Waging the Fight Progressives Have Been Hoping for, News Comes of an Original Sin
Let me just take a moment to thank President Obama and the leadership of our military in overturning the shameful policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
There I feel better. It's good to thank the president from time to time for a job well done. And it will be the last time I do so in this post...
I am suffering today from a serious and painful bout of cognitive dissonance. On the same day that Obama lifted, at long last, DADT; on the same day that he gave a stinging speech, possibly setting up a trap for the GOP that my friend and co-author John Farley predicted months ago (either the GOP support cutting things like Social Security, or they go back on their no tax pledges); comes this bit of highly depressing news:
In journalist Ron Suskind's new book, Obama is reported to have been to the right of Larry Summers on economic policy. Larry Summers--who more than any other single human on the planet, is responsible for the destruction of the world in 2008--is someone Obama had no business appointing to his economic team in any capacity, let alone putting him in charge of it all. But now to find out that the president was even more conservative than Summers is a truly despicable reality.
Forgive me if I rant a bit. Economic policy is my area of expertise. For all the other aspects of Obama that I admire, I simply can't forgive him for being such a complete stooge to Wall Street and the Conventional Wisdom of the economic elite who sunk the ship. They bailed out Wall Street--a move I supported for the good of all--but then dropped the ball on helping Main Street and average home owners. Now the public are nearly as likely to associate Democrats with protecting big business as they do the GOP. So, it is especially damning that Suskind quotes the president as saying the rise in unemployment is essentially the fault of the workers themselves.
The White House is of course distancing itself from Suskind's book---just as the Bush administration did when he wrote his award winners on them. But Suskind is no rookie. He is no suspect muckraker-mud slinger either. He is a top journalist. If progressives believed him about Bush, it is not credible to distrust him over Obama.
The president no doubt had some truly daunting odds against him from the start in the weak-kneed blue Dog Democrats in congress--many who came in on his coat tails. But now it begins to emerge that Obama didn't even see stimulus as the silver bullet. No wonder he never tried to use the bully pulpit to push for more spending when he had the only chance he would have ever gotten: he didn't buy the argument!
So he thinks a rise in productivity is to blame for the greater rise in unemployment than his "crack team" predicted? When all the time folks like Paul Krugman and others were screaming at him that he was underestimating unemployment by two percentage points (a claim almost exactly accurate, it would turn out) and that his stimulus package was not large enough!
I am sick of hearing myself make this argument, but I think the future of progressive politics literally hung on that decision of stimulus. Because now the public thinks the whole idea of Keynesianism is dead and discredited. And we all may be saddled with PresidentPerry and a GOP congress as a result.
Obama's leadership style of compromising with himself before he enters the bargaining table resulted in his not even attempting a stimulus that was large enough. Partly driven by his refusal to appoint even one member of his economic leadership that saw the crisis coming, and dutifully failed to perceive the depth of the crisis that would come once in office. We will never know if a stimulus with sufficient size was possible because he ruled it out from the start.
We can only hope that the president's recent rhetoric signals that he has, at long last, learned his lesson. The GOP are not interested in compromise, nor have they ever been. Obama has a habit of coming back from the brink of oblivion. He also has the luck of usually running against very weak opponents. Many would say both a Rick Perry and Mitt Romney fit those bills. But the truth is, Mr. Obama trails them both in several recent head-to-head polls, especially to Romney.
Let's hope that Obama's new fighting spirit may change that. For as poor as he has been on economic policy, the GOP candidates are running on a platform that can be summed up in a simple bumper sticker now gaining popularity: "Repeal the 20th Century:Vote GOP."
Interestingly the GOP candidates are running significantly to the right of most self-identified Republicans in opinion polls. Indicating they are being controlled the by the extreme right in the so-called Tea Party. If the GOP hopes to win in 2012 they will need to control this extreme faction in their midst. That they have thus far been unable to may be Mr. Obama's saving grace.
One that, as far as economic policy goes, he does not deserve.
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