Beware Condemning Barack Obama For A Low Bully Pulpit Profile
Peppered with complaints about his relative silence and flagging leadership, the president urges his friends and allies to be patient. They are understandably skittish: His low profile is underscored by unceasing criticism from his political opponents and even broadcast commentators. His supporters wonder what happened to the politician who had used new technology to communicate with the American people.
Barack Obama in 2011, assailed by friends and foes alike for quiescence in the face of—take your pick—the looming budget battle, disaster in Japan, or upheavals in the Mideast and Midwest? No. Try Franklin Roosevelt in 1935. With Father Coughlin and others railing on the radio and in Congress during a period of slow motion on his agenda, Roosevelt was besieged by nervous allies wondering why he wasn’t showing more vocal and forceful leadership. “My difficulty is a strange and weird sense known as ‘public psychology,’ ” he wrote to one supporter. He explained to another his belief that the public cannot “be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note on the scale.” [See the month’s best editorial cartoons.]
FDR had mastered what his cousin Teddy had termed the “bully pulpit,” not simply through great speeches, but through an understanding of that platform’s limitations. Overexposure can diminish its power as the president’s voice becomes one of many, so it is most effective when used judiciously. Consider Roosevelt’s famous fireside chats. Popular imagination sees them as something like the modern weekly radio address. In fact, he never gave more than four in a year.
Another president who understood the limitations of the bully pulpit was John F. Kennedy. During his brief tenure too, allies complained of his failure to speak often or forcefully enough on key issues, especially civil rights.
“The nation will listen only if it is a moment of great urgency,” he once said. He liked to quote Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, where in response to Owen Glendower’s boast that he can “call spirits from the vasty deep,” Hotspur replies: “Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?” Kennedy understood that the power of a president’s speech is constrained, or augmented, by context. To the extent his audience is primed for a message, it resonates, multiplying the power of that address. The most effective presidents find a leadership balance where they are far enough in front of public opinion to lead it, but not so far as to lose it.
JFK and FDR had another important commonality: They were skilled communicators at times of communication revolution. FDR came into office just as most U.S. households first had radio receivers. He wasn’t the first president to deal with this new mass medium, but he was the first to understand the opportunity it provided to fundamentally change the way presidents engaged with voters.
So too Kennedy was not the first president to deal with television, but he was the first to figure out what kind of new communications opportunities it afforded. He used weekly televised news conferences, the first such presidential appearances to be broadcast. Columnist James Reston warned the president that it was “the goofiest idea since the hula hoop,” but Kennedy relished the opportunity to connect directly with the voters. And the news conferences allowed him to flash his most winning qualities: his smarts, his broad grasp of facts and data, and of course his ironic wit. Kennedy referred to these conferences as “the 6 o’clock comedy hour.” But more seriously, he said, “We couldn’t survive without them.”
Which brings us back to Obama, another eloquent Democrat taking criticism for inexpertly using (or failing to use) the bully pulpit. Poor Obama has gotten it coming and going. When he first took office he was seemingly everywhere at once, and widely panned as being overexposed. This lurching approach to public communications is due at least in part to the fact that Obama, like his predecessors, is trying to govern at a time of communication transformation. In fact he is arguably dealing with a double revolution, involving both the fracturing of the old mass media (presidents can no longer count on the television audience being easily captured on just three networks) and the rise of the new social media. At first Obama and his team tried to flood the zone; now they seem to have adopted a more classical view that the presidential voice is a resource to be husbanded.
Obama is caught at the crux of a tension in presidential leadership that has grown since FDR chatted with Americans at their firesides. The limitations of the bully pulpit are in opposition to the demands mass media have placed on it. In his single term as president, from 1929 to 1933, Herbert Hoover made an average of eight public appearances per month. In his thousand days, JFK made 19 per month. In his first term, Bill Clinton averaged 28. In his two years in office, according to statistics compiled by CBS News’s Mark Knoller, Obama averaged more than 42 public appearances per month. Presidents must speak more, even if it diminishes the power of their voice.
In noting similarities between Obama and his predecessors, I do not mean to suggest equivalency. It may well be that in 50 years historians will say that Obama was the first real social media president in the way of FDR and radio and JFK and television. But if such mastery does emerge, it is currently still a work in progress. In the meantime, his friends especially would do well to remember that the bully pulpit is not a cure-all. And that even our most eloquent leaders have had good reasons for their silence as well as their words.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U.S. News and World Report, March 23, 2011
Iraq Then, Libya Now: The Case Has Yet To Be Made
Five years ago, in the darkest days of insurgent violence and Sunni-Shia strife, it seemed as if the Iraq war would shadow American foreign policy for decades, frightening a generation’s worth of statesmen away from using military force. Where there had once been a “Vietnam syndrome,” now there would be an “Iraq syndrome,” inspiring harrowing flashbacks to Baghdad and Falluja in any American politician contemplating an intervention overseas.
But in today’s Washington, no such syndrome is in evidence. Indeed, it’s striking how quickly the bipartisan coalition that backed the Iraq invasion has reassembled itself to urge President Obama to use military force against Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi.
The Iraq war became known as George W. Bush’s war after Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction didn’t turn up, because at that point no liberal wanted to take responsibility for the conflict. But the initial invasion was supported by Democrats as well as Republicans, liberal internationalists as well as neoconservatives — Hillary Clinton as well as John McCain, The New Republic as well as The Weekly Standard.
Now a similar chorus is arguing that the United States should intervene
directly in Libya’s civil war: with a no-flight zone, certainly, and perhaps with arms for the Libyan rebels and air strikes against Qaddafi’s military as well. As in 2002 and 2003, the case
for intervention is being pushed by a broad cross-section of politicians and opinion-makers, from Bill Clinton to Bill Kristol, Fareed Zakaria to Newt Gingrich, John Kerry to Christopher Hitchens.
The justifications for military action, too, echo many of the arguments marshaled for toppling Saddam Hussein. America’s credibility is on the line. The Libyan people deserve our support. Deposing Qaddafi will strike a blow for democracy and human rights.
It’s a testament to the resilience of American power that we’re hearing these kind of arguments so soon after the bloodiest years of the Iraq war. It’s also a testament to the achievements of the American military: absent the successes of the 2007 troop surge, we’d probably be too busy extricating ourselves from a war-torn Iraq to even contemplate another military intervention in a Muslim nation.
But that resilience and those achievements may have set a trap for us, by encouraging the American leadership class to draw relatively narrow lessons from the Iraq war — lessons that only apply to wars premised on faulty W.M.D. intelligence, or wars led by Donald Rumsfeld.
In reality, there are lessons from our years of failure in Iraq that can be applied to an air war over Libya as easily as to a full-scale invasion or counterinsurgency. Indeed, they can be applied to any intervention — however limited its aims, multilateral its means, and competent its commanders.
One is that the United States shouldn’t go to war unless it has a plan not only for the initial military action, but also for the day afterward, and the day after that. Another is that the United States shouldn’t go to war without a detailed understanding of the country we’re entering, and the forces we’re likely to empower.
Moreover, even with the best-laid plans, warfare is always a uniquely high-risk enterprise — which means that the burden of proof should generally rest with hawks rather than with doves, and seven reasonable-sounding reasons for intervening may not add up to a single convincing case for war.
Advocates of a Libyan intervention don’t seem to have internalized these lessons. They have rallied around a no-flight zone as their Plan A for toppling Qaddafi, but most military analysts seem to think that it will fail to do the job, and there’s no consensus on Plan B. Would we escalate to air strikes? Arm the rebels? Sit back and let Qaddafi claim to have outlasted us?
If we did supply the rebels, who exactly would be receiving our money and munitions? Libya’s internal politics are opaque, to put it mildly. But here’s one disquieting data point, courtesy of the Center for a New American Security’s : Eastern Libya, the locus of the rebellion, sent more foreign fighters per capita to join the Iraqi insurgency than any other region in the Arab world.
And if the civil war dragged on, what then? Twice in the last two decades, in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, the United States has helped impose a no-flight zone. In both cases, it was just a stepping-stone to further escalation: bombing campaigns, invasion, occupation and nation-building.
None of this means that an intervention is never the wisest course of action. But the strategic logic needs to be compelling, the threat to our national interest obvious, the case for war airtight.
With Libya, that case has not yet been made.
By: Ross Douthat, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 13, 2011
Put-up-Or-Shut-up Time For Republicans On Health-Care Reform
It’s put-up-or-shut-up time for Republicans. They managed to make it through the health-care debate without offering serious solutions of their own, and — perhaps more impressive — through the election by promising to tell us their solutions after they’d won. But the jig is up. They need a health-care plan — and quickly.
The GOP knew this day would come. In May 2009, Republican message-maestro Frank Luntz released a polling memo warning that “if the dynamic becomes ‘President Obama is on the side of reform and Republicans are against it,’ then the battle is lost.” Repeal, Luntz argued, wouldn’t be good enough. It would have to be “repeal and replace.” And so it was.
That, however, is easier said than done.
To understand the trouble the Republicans find themselves in, you need to understand the party’s history with health-care reform. For much of the 20th century, Democrats fought for a single-payer system, and Republicans countered with calls for an employer-based system. In February 1974, President Richard Nixon made it official. “Comprehensive health insurance is an idea whose time has come in America,” he said, announcing a plan in which “every employer would be required to offer all full-time employees the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan.”
In a moment of historically bad judgment — Ted Kennedy later called it his greatest political regret — Democrats turned him down. They thought they could still get single payer. They were wrong.
By the 1990s, they had learned from their mistake. Bill Clinton took office and, after a wrenching year of negotiations, announced legislation similar to Nixon’s.
”Under this health-care security plan,” Clinton said, “every employer and every individual will be asked to contribute something to health care.”
But Republicans again balked, calling instead for a system of “individual responsibility.” Senate Republicans quickly offered two bills — the horribly named Health Equity and Access Reform Act and the Consumer Choice Health Security Act — based on the idea that every person who has the means to buy health insurance should have to do so. We now call that concept “the individual mandate.”
Both bills attracted 20 or more co-sponsors. Neither passed, as Republicans yanked their compromise legislation the moment Democrats became desperate enough to consider it. The individual mandate, however, didn’t go away. It kicked around conservative health-care policy circles, racking up endorsements from the conservative Heritage Foundation and the libertarian magazine Reason. A year later, the mandate showed up in a law that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed in Massachusetts. And then it was in the bipartisan proposal that Utah Republican Bob Bennett and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden introduced in the Senate. And next, it was the centerpiece of the Democrats’ health-care reform push. Consensus, it seemed, was at hand.
Or not. Republicans turned on the individual mandate again. Senators who’d had their names on a bill that included an individual mandate — Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Bob Bennett, Mike Crapo, Bob Corker, Lamar Alexander, Olympia Snowe and Kit Bond, to name a few — voted to object, calling the policy “unconstitutional.” Romney had to explain away his signature accomplishment as governor of Massachusetts. And Republicans found themselves without a fallback.
The party’s current mood on health-care policy is perhaps best expressed by the efforts that Michael Cannon, an influential health-care wonk at the libertarian Cato Institute, has made to enlist members in his “anti-universal coverage club.”
Enter Wyden-Brown, an Affordable Care Act amendment that the White House has made a big show of endorsing: It says that any state that can produce a credible plan to cover as many people, with as comprehensive insurance, at as low a cost as the Affordable Care Act can wriggle out of all the law’s mandates but still receive all the law’s money. Vermont’s governor, for one, is stoked: He wants to try a single-payer proposal.
Most conservatives have been actively hostile. They make some fair technical points. The law envisions the secretary of Health and Human Services handing out the waivers, while the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler would prefer to see a bipartisan commission in charge. But most take aim at the proposal’s basic goals: that care has to be as universal, as good and as cheap.
Cannon, for instance, frets that there’s no conservative policy that “would cover as many people as a law that forces them to buy coverage under penalty of law.” Butler worries that it “locks the states into guaranteeing a generous and costly level of benefits.”
But as the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn points out, under the Affordable Care Act, a family of four could shell out $12,500 out of pocket for medical costs. How much stingier should the insurance be?
And Cannon is right that conservatives don’t have solutions to provide coverage as universal as what the Affordable Care Act would. But whose fault is that?
Conservatives once offered solutions competitive with what the Democrats were proposing, but over the past 30 years, they’ve abandoned each and every one of them to stymie Democratic presidents. Confronted with a challenge to provide broader access to better health care at a lower cost, they’re reduced to complaining that those aren’t the right goals for health-care reform. But we’ve yet to see how “less comprehensive insurance for fewer people” would play in Peoria. My hunch is it wouldn’t play very well.
For decades, Republicans have chosen stopping Democratic presidents over reforming the American health-care system. Now that reform has passed, the solution for members of the GOP is to press the rewind button. They’re about to find out that it’s not enough.
On that much, Luntz and I agree: If the public comes to see the GOP as opposed to reform, “the battle is lost” — at least if you believe “the battle” is to beat the Democrats rather than provide quality health insurance to every American.
By: Ezra Klein, Columnist, The Washington Post, March 8, 2011
Speaking Of The Federal Government, “Why Wouldn’t The Tea Party Shut It Down?”
No one remembers anything in America, especially in Washington, so the history of the Great Government Shutdown of 1995 is being rewritten with impunity by Republicans flirting with a Great Government Shutdown of 2011. The bottom line of the revisionist spin is this: that 2011 is no 1995. Should the unthinkable occur on some coming budget D-Day — or perhaps when the deadline to raise the federal debt ceiling arrives this spring — the G.O.P. is cocksure that it can pin the debacle on the Democrats.
In the right’s echo chamber, voters are seen as so fed up with deficits that they’ll put principle over temporary inconveniences — like, say, a halt in processing new Social Security applicants or veterans’ benefit checks. Who needs coddled government workers to deal with those minutiae anyway? As Mike Huckabee has cheerfully pointed out, many more federal services are automated now than in the olden days of the late 20th century. Phone trees don’t demand pensions.
Remarkably (or not) much of the Beltway press has bought the line that comparisons between then and now are superficial. Sure, Bill Clinton, like Barack Obama, was bruised by his first midterms, with his party losing the House to right-wing revolutionaries hawking the Contract With America, a Tea Party ur-text demanding balanced budgets. But after that, we’re instructed, the narratives diverge. John Boehner is no bomb-throwing diva like Newt Gingrich, whose petulant behavior inspired the famous headline “Cry Baby” in The Daily News. A crier — well, yes — but Boehner’s too conventional a conservative to foment a reckless shutdown. Obama, prone to hanging back from Congressional donnybrooks, bears scant resemblance to the hands-on Clinton, who clamored to get into the ring with Newt.
Those propagating the 2011-is-not-1995 line also assume that somehow Boehner will prevent the new G.O.P. insurgents from bringing down the government they want to bring down. But if Gingrich couldn’t control his hard-line freshman class of 73 members in 1995 — he jokingly referred to them then as “a third party” — it’s hard to imagine how the kinder, gentler Boehner will control his 87 freshmen, many of them lacking government or legislative experience, let alone the gene for compromise. In the new Congress’s short history, the new speaker has already had trouble controlling his caucus. On Friday Gingrich made Boehner’s task harder by writing a Washington Post op-ed plea that the G.O.P. stick to its guns.
The 2011 rebels are to the right of their 1995 antecedents in any case. That’s why this battle, ostensibly over the deficit, is so much larger than the sum of its line-item parts. The highest priority of America’s current political radicals is not to balance government budgets but to wage ideological warfare in Washington and state capitals alike. The relatively few dollars that would be saved by the proposed slashing of federal spending on Planned Parenthood and Head Start don’t dent the deficit; the cuts merely savage programs the right abhors. In Wisconsin, where state workers capitulated to Gov. Scott Walker’s demands for financial concessions, the radical Republicans’ only remaining task is to destroy labor’s right to collective bargaining.
That’s not to say there is no fiscal mission in the right’s agenda, both nationally and locally — only that the mission has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks. The bankrupt moral equation codified in the Bush era — that tax cuts tilted to the highest bracket were a higher priority even than paying for two wars — is now a given. The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.
In this bigger picture, the Wisconsin governor’s fawning 20-minute phone conversation with a prankster impersonating the oil billionaire David Koch last week, while entertaining, is merely a footnote. The Koch Industries political action committee did contribute to Walker’s campaign (some $43,000) and did help underwrite Tea Party ads and demonstrations in Madison. But this governor is merely a petty-cash item on the Koch ledger — as befits the limited favors he can offer Koch’s mammoth, sprawling, Kansas-based industrial interests.
Look to Washington for the bigger story. As The Los Angeles Times recently reported, Koch Industries and its employees form the largest bloc of oil and gas industry donors to members of the new House Energy and Commerce Committee, topping even Exxon Mobil. And what do they get for that largess? As a down payment, the House budget bill not only reduces financing for the Environmental Protection Agency but also prohibits its regulation of greenhouse gases.
Here again, the dollars that will be saved are minute in terms of the federal deficit, but the payoff to Koch interests from a weakened E.P.A. is priceless. The same dynamic is at play in the House’s reduced spending for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service. and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (charged with regulation of the esoteric Wall Street derivatives that greased the financial crisis). The reduction in the deficit will be minimal, but the bottom lines for the Kochs and their peers, especially on Wall Street, will swell.
These special interests will stay in the closet next week when the Tea Partiers in the House argue (as the Gingrich cohort once did) that their only agenda is old-fashioned fiscal prudence. The G.O.P. is also banking on the presumption that Obama will bide his time too long, as he did in the protracted health care and tax-cut melees, and allow the Fox News megaphone, not yet in place in ’95, to frame the debate. Listening to the right’s incessant propaganda, you’d never know that the latest Pew survey found that Americans want to increase, not decrease, most areas of federal spending — and by large margins in the cases of health care and education.
The G.O.P. leadership faced those same headwinds from voters in ’95. As Boehner, then on the Gingrich team, told The Times in a January 1996 post-mortem, the G.O.P. had tested the notion of talking about “balancing the budget and Medicare in the same sentence” and discovered it would bring “big trouble.” Gingrich’s solution, he told The Times then, was simple: “We learned that if you talked about ‘preserving’ and ‘protecting’ Medicare, it worked.” Which it did until it didn’t — at which point the Gingrich revolution imploded.
Rather hilariously, the Republicans’ political gurus still believe that Gingrich’s ruse can work. In a manifesto titled “How the G.O.P. Can Win the Budget Battle” published in The Wall Street Journal last week, Fred Barnes of Fox News put it this way: “Bragging about painful but necessary cuts to Medicare scares people. Stressing the goal of saving Medicare won’t.” But the G.O.P. is trotting out one new political strategy this time. Current House leaders, mindful that their ’95 counterparts’ bravado backfired, constantly reiterate that they are “not looking for a government shutdown,” as Paul Ryan puts it. They seem to believe that if they repeat this locution often enough it will inoculate them from blame should a shutdown happen anyway — when, presumably, they are not looking.
Maybe, but no less an authority than Dick Armey, these days a leading Tea Party operative, thinks otherwise. Back in ’95, as a Gingrich deputy, he had been more bellicose than most in threatening a shutdown, as Bill Clinton recounts in his memoirs. But in 2006, Armey told a different story when reminiscing to an interviewer, Ryan Sager: “Newt’s position was, presidents get blamed for shutdowns, and he cited Ronald Reagan. My position was, Republicans get blamed for shutdowns. I argued that it is counterintuitive to the average American to think that the Democrat wants to shut down the government. They’re the advocates of the government. It is perfectly logical to them that Republicans would shut it down, because we’re seen as antithetical to government.”
Armey’s logic is perfect indeed, but logic is not the rage among his ideological compatriots this year. Otherwise, the Tea Party radicals might have figured out the single biggest difference between 1995 and 2011 — the state of the economy. Last time around, America was more or less humming along with an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent. This time we are still digging out of the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, with an unemployment rate of 9 percent and oil prices on the rise. To even toy with shutting down the government in this uncertain climate is to risk destabilizing the nascent recovery, with those in need of the government safety net (including 43 million Americans on food stamps) doing most of the suffering.
Not that the gravity of this moment will necessarily stop the right from using the same playbook as last time. Still heady with hubris from the midterms — and having persuaded themselves that Gingrich’s 1995 history can’t possibly repeat itself — radical Republicans are convinced that deficit-addled voters are on their side no matter what. The president, meanwhile, is playing his cards close to his vest. Let’s hope he knows that he, not the speaker, is the player holding a full house, and that he will tell the country in no uncertain terms that much more than money is on the table.
By: Frank Rich, Op-Ed Columnist-The New York Times, Originally Published 2/26/11
The “Deficit Problem” Isn’t Financial: It’s Political
The federal budget deficit and its cumulative cousin, the national debt, are much more political and media phenomena than they are financial. Which isn’t to say that they don’t exist. Obviously, they do. But they have been invested with apocalyptic significance mainly for political purposes: to scare people and to coerce them into reducing the size and the scope of government.
The truth is that massive deficits are almost exclusively a Republican creation. But Republicans were conspicuously silent in the decades of their big run-up, when the deficits were providing the hollow illusion of easy prosperity. The other truth is that it is only deficits that can get the economy out of the ditch that Republicans left it in when Bush slunk out of office.
But as Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has said, “Our first priority is to make sure Obama is a one-term president.” That is the real reason Republicans are born-again fiscal fundamentalists: deficits are the only thing that might actually turn the economy around and that is exactly what the Republicans are so intent on avoiding.
The first tip-off about the fake hysteria surrounding the deficits is that all the Chicken Littles crying the end of the world were silent when the real run-up was being conducted. Look at the history.
Ronald Reagan inherited a national debt of $1 trillion. He cut taxes on the rich and exploded government spending so that in just twelve years, by the end of the Bush I administration, the debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion.
Where were the Nervous Nellies back then? And Republicans have apotheosized Reagan into some kind of secular saint, a totally schizophrenic adulation if we are to believe their current hair-on-fire shtick about the toxicity of debt.
Bill Clinton reversed Reagan’s supply side economics. He raised taxes on the wealthy and cut government spending to the lowest percent of GDP in 40 years. As a result, he paid down the deficit every year he was in office, even delivering a budgetary surplus in each of his last three years. He handed a $136 billion surplus to George W. Bush in 2001.
If Republicans were truly sincere about their putative religious aversion to deficits, they would idolize Clinton, who paid them down, and demonize Reagan who ran them up. It says everything about their honesty that they do exactly the opposite.
Bush II, of course, returned to the same voodoo economics that Reagan and his father had embraced. He aggressively cut taxes on the rich (his “base” as he called them) and exploded government spending. He ran deficits every single year of his presidency, doubling the national debt in only eight years.
Again, where were the Heraldic voices of doom when their country really needed them? They were nowhere to be found. In fact, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, brushed off Treasury secretary Paul O’Neil’s concerns about the hemorrhage with his famous dictum, “Deficits don’t matter. Reagan proved that.” Remember?
So, the choice to get all apoplectic about government borrowing is exactly that — a choice, and a political one at that. It is a choice Republicans conveniently never invoke when the deficits are their own, as they almost always are. Again, look at the history.
A Republican has occupied the White House for 28 of the last 42 years and never once in all of those years did any one of them ever produce a single balanced budget. Not once. They are financial phonies. Fiscal frauds.
And how ironic is it that these same Cassandras who are prophesying the end of the world are just as adamant that Bush’s tax cuts for the very rich must be preserved at all costs. Over the next ten years, those tax cuts will cost the government $700 billion in lost revenues, a seven hundred billion dollar, dollar-for-dollar increase in the deficit.
So, they can’t have it both ways. If the deficits do, in fact, pose an existential threat to the republic, then the government had better bring in more revenues from whatever source it can. But it looks like the deficits aren’t quite so onerous that we should bring in revenues from the only source that could actually pay them, the very rich. Funny thing, huh?
It is this duplicity on both history and policy that so clearly betrays Republican hypocrisy. They’re not interested in reducing deficits. They’re interested in reducing the size, the scope, and the efficacy of government, for government is the only agent left in the country with the capacity to stand up to the big corporations, to stop their sociopathic looting of the economy and their suicidal predations on the environment.
Republicans are also determined to undermine, even destroy, anyone who stands in the way of their agenda. Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, is the archetypal poster-child for this role.
Wisconsin’s legislative fiscal analyst had reported that the state had a $120 million surplus before the governor gave $140 million in tax breaks to corporations. So now, being shocked — SHOCKED — to discover a deficit, Walker claims he needs to dismantle public sector unions.
It’s like that iconic parable describing chutzpah: the child who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan. But wait! It actually gets worse. The unions responded with substantial give-backs to help control the state government’s costs. Walker’s response? He’s not interested.
You see, the deficit is not, in fact, the problem. It’s just the fiscal train wreck that Republicans, from Wisconsin to Washington, have engineered to justify dismantling the social safety net and breaking the resistance of those people who will not submit themselves to living as serfs.
Finally, beyond the sham of their real history, beyond two-faced policies, there is the simple, conveniently overlooked matter of economics itself.
Ninety percent of the Obama deficits can be traced directly to actions of the Bush administration that carry over to the present. These include two sets of tax cuts for the rich, two seemingly unending wars, a $600 billion give-away to the pharmaceutical industry, and The Greatest Economic Collapse Since the Great Depression. That is what Obama inherited from Bush, together with a $1.3 trillion deficit. Again, look at the data.
Bush’s Great Recession started in December 2007, 13 months before Obama took office. In January 2009 when Obama was sworn in, the economy was losing 780,000 jobs a month. A month later, in February 2009, he pushed through a $787 billion stimulus package. Job losses bottomed out two months later, in April, and by November the economy was not only not losing jobs any more, it was creating them.
Did the turn-around require deficits? Of course it did! The economy had imploded and Bush was only too happy to toss the turd to his successor. And where else was the impetus going to come from to actually re-start demand? The alternative would have been an accelerating death spiral into complete economic collapse. We did that once under the tutelage of Republican economics. It was called The Great Depression.
Now, to be sure, the current recovery is fragile. Eight million jobs were lost in the Bush Recession. They haven’t been replaced. Eight trillion dollars of home equity was destroyed and it may not be replaced for decades. Fifty million people are living in poverty. Consumer spending makes up some 70% of the economy. So, as long as consumers are so battered, spending is going to be weak.
And businesses are certainly not taking up the slack. Though their balance sheets are glutted with some $2 trillion made from shifting jobs to China, investment in the U.S. economy as a percent of GDP is at 12%, the lowest it’s been in the last 40 years.
Are Obama’s policies beyond reproach? Not by a long shot. He should have pushed for a much larger stimulus package and not caved to Republican demands to extend the Bush tax cuts. He shouldn’t have gone along with Bush’s larcenous give-aways to the banks and should have done much more to constrain the soaring costs of health care which are the real source of the economy’s debt problems.
But right now it is federal government spending that is keeping the economy afloat, the more so as states and cities, which cannot run deficits, are cutting their spending. In fact, the surest way to sink the economy would be to pull the plug on federal government spending. Which says more about the real motives of the latter-day deficit hawks than all of their insufferably strident sanctimony combined.
Yes, in the long run, the debts will have to be repaid. But the best way to assure that that can happen is to get the economy moving again, to get people working and paying taxes, just like Roosevelt did the last time Republicans drove it over a cliff. But rebuilding is going to require some deficit spending, at least in the short run.
Republicans don’t abhor deficits. They love them. That is the real “money-where-your-mouth-is” truth that all of their pious posturing cannot disguise. Their own history couldn’t be more persuasive on that point. What they abhor is deficit spending that will help the economy on a Democrat’s watch. Their aversion to deficits isn’t economic, it’s political. And their motives aren’t exemplary. They’re despicable.
By: Robert Freeman, CommonDreams.org, originally posted February 27, 2011
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