I keep telling myself that the woozy feeling that the Obama administration is already failing is mainly due to the 24-hour news cycle. We get to see the sausage-making in real time. And the sudden ubiquity of Republicans all over the corporate media, despite the public's rejection of their failed ideas. I keep telling myself all this.
Still, some worries. If Rahm Emmanuel is so incredibly effective as Obama's right-hand, he has yet to show it. The so-called stimulus is bogged down and deeply flawed. One cabinet nominee after another is tripped by tax or conflict-of-interest problems. It's nice that Obama admitted a mistake, but he has yet to focus, in simple, Reaganesque language what he wants and use it to go over the head of an obstructionist Congress.
Why am I not comforted that a group of "moderate" senators is trying to cut $100 billion of "fat" — the media's term — from the stimulus? In this supposed lard is mass transit funding desperately needed for systems that are already cutting back — hurting the working poor the hardest. Transit and rail are my markers for real change, and given stable funding they would provide jobs paying family wages that couldn't be sent overseas. Fat? How about South Carolina's unremarked interstate to nowhere?
There may be a few fighting Democrats, but they aren't sucking up the oxygen in the media echo chamber outside of progressive radio. Instead, we get Mitch McConnell all the time, saying thing like, "If you spent a million dollars a day every year since the birth of Jesus, you still wouldn't get to a trillion." As a reader of Talking Points Memo wrote, "if you started the day Jesus was born and created TWENTY million
dollars in wealth every day you would have the wealth created in the US
economy each year. AND if you flushed TWO million dollars down the
toilet every day since Jesus was born you would have the credit losses
in the US economy just last year. AND if you flushed THREE million a
day, you would have lost less than the money that this recession is
projected to cost by the end of next year."
Where was the honorable gentleman from Kentucky and his merry band when President Bush was leading us, by lies, into a war of choice that will probably end up costing $3 trillion, according to Nobel laureate Joseph Siglitz and Linda Blimes? They approved every single appropriation. Now they have nothing to contribute except their Aflac duck quack, tax cuts! They have much to obstruct. They are at their most effective in the opposition, especially bolstered by false "studies" and "facts" out of well-funded reactionary "think tanks". They have the president right where they want him, especially with his attempt at bipartisanship. This smacks of the effort by some civic leaders in Phoenix to "find the key" that would unlock the minds of the extremists running the Arizona Legislature. It can't be done. You can't win the hearts and minds of this highly disciplined cohort of reactionaries. You can defeat them. You can go over their heads to the people, a la Reagan.
The Republicans have a tremendous stake in an Obama failure — remember, they have four years to hang this recession around his neck. The party is out of ideas and refuses to move to the center. It could be dismissed as the Southern/rural regional party it has become except for one thing: It still best represents the interests of the ruling corporate and wealthy elite. This latter group is most threatened by real change.
Make no mistake: the change is already happening. It is the discontinuity that is our future. Too much of the stimulus merely seeks to prop up the unsustainable. Does the president, for all the suppleness of his fine mind, understand that the future is discontinuity — the next 30 years won't be a repeat of the past 30, if only we can get past this downturn and go back to business as usual? This is a critical, and so far unanswered, question.
The stimulus itself risks being oversold. The financial shock, the first one to arrive in force from the larger Great Disruption, was created over many years of deregulation, industry consolidation, bad trade deals that devastated manufacturing, the "financialization" of the economy and the vast income inequality that is savaging the middle class. It can't be fixed in a "timely, targeted and temporary" manner any more than it was created.
Meanwhile, the stimulus risks being hijacked to bail out the housing industry, sell cars and build interstates to nowhere that make rural land suddenly viable for more sprawl. A case in point it "help for homeowners." This sounds good on the surface, but forgive my suspicions. Owning a house went from being a hard-earned privilege to a consumer product — "you should buy a house and move every two years — otherwise you're not helping the economy," the real estate hucksters in Phoenix used to say. So will this new "help" merely be an effort to revive a mini, and short-lived, real estate bubble? Heaven forbid that we create sustainable construction jobs building mass transit, rebuilding our center cities and retrofitting suburbia for a high-cost energy future. This has no constituency compared with the oil companies, car companies, house builders, etc. (And every tax credit only adds to the deficit, with little return compared to public infrastructure investment).
Even the New York Times, notoriously thick-headed on this issue, raised a red flag about tax credits to buy houses and cars:
Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, said that homebuyers would have trouble getting loans because of the continued tightness in the credit markets, and that the car buyer incentive fell short by not focusing on fuel-efficient vehicles. He said the money might be better directed at mass transit.
“They are also structurally unsound,” Mr. Posen said of the two provisions, “reinforcing the attempts of industries that are too large — housing construction, automobile production — to survive based on government distortions.” He called them both “terrible, pandering ideas.”
Yes, it's a marathon, not a sprint. It sure ain't a honeymoon, though. And it portends a rocky marriage.
There are arguments made that suggest Obama is, at heart, deeply conservative, that his respect for institutions as well as the Constitution lead him to govern from an idiosyncratic center. But that center is as much the problem as the right since it has no real vision or competence. What Obama in effect does is create a false debate between the fact-free right and the vision-impaired center. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, when the result is stimulus spending for a 20th century economy.
By marginalizing the left, the corporate media neuter what should be a vigorous debate. No real issues are being discussed because half of the argument is ignored. Obama will preside over but he won’t push the debate. So, we’re left with something approaching mush, meaningless alternatives between doing too little and doing nothing at all.
The GOP is currently overplaying its hand, which should hand Obama a victory of sorts. In a couple of years, we can revisit the issue again since America’s economy will likely be struggling with systemic issues of inadequate investment and maldistribution. Health care will be one of those issues. And if Obama chooses to preside rather than lead, he will let one more vital sector flounder while searching for some metaphysically perfect fulcrum point between false choices.
While we’re making useless time metaphors, how much did Bush spend/lose/waste every second of his tenure? Didn’t he turn the biggest suplus ever into the biggest deficit ever in about two years?
Why, exactly, are the powerful threatened by change? Doesn’t change represent an opportunity? Weren’t most of their companies created by some other change in the past? The answer is that the current leaders are status quo whores who don’t know how to anything different than what they’re already doing. “Leader” doesn’t describe them at all. If they actually knew anything about making money or building industries they would realize that this situation can lead to the kind of empire-building that the transcontinental railroads did.
I’ve always thought that aspiring to the office ought to be an automatic disqualification for Presidents, but Congress is worse by actively working to make the incumbents fail. How we do anything when half of the people doing the work are trying to make it fail? We can’t. It’s childish behavior any way you look at it. And I feel the same way when the roles are reversed.
I’ll give Obama time to show what he’s really going to do. Time to learn what he can do and what he can’t do. Time to learn how to be President.
His first week was encouraging with his Presidential orders. The second has not gone as well with the contoversy around appointments.
The last few presidents have been judged on their first 100 days. It seem that now we expect it in 100 hours. It’s too soon to judge and we have too many promises and too few acts to make a sound judgement.
We learned that the Bush administration always had many layers of meaning to their actions. You might, but I don’t know how devious Obama is. His appointment of a Republican to Commerce looks like a bipartisan gesture on the surface but could have been a way to get another Democrat into Congress. Seeing that he made deal to ensure that the replacement was also a Republican could be a sign of weakness or a commitment to honest and open government. There could also be other reasons and deeper levels. I don’t know and neither does anyone outside Obama’s inner circle. Time will tell.
Stimulus: Moderates Exhibit Profiles in Courage
While the stance of Senators John McCain and John Kyl in opposing the Economic Recovery and Stimulus Bill has been ideologically principled, in this time of economic meltdown the real heroes have been the Senate moderates such as Senators Susan Collins, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Joe Lieberman, and Ben Nelson, who were willing to do the hard legislative work of forging the necessary compromise to resuscitate the American economy.
The economic house is on fire, they know it, and they have bravely endeavored to save those Americans who are suffering and to keep the financial fire from spreading by cutting back on the pork. Despite incurring the wrath of many Senate colleagues, they ventured forth, epitomizing what John F. Kennedy termed “Profiles in Courage”.
For them, reality and pragmatism trumped ideology. For that, they deserve our thanks.
The comment Susan Collins made on the Senate floor should be engraved in white marble on a Capitol wall: “The American people don’t want to see partisan gridlock.” That was the message of the 2008 election– and legislators ignore it at their peril.
RW (Skip) Kistner, Phoenix