“Slippery Fish In The Same Malodorous Kettle”: Mitch McConnell And The Obstructionist GOP Undermine The Economy
In the realm of political strategy, there are two mindsets on the question of attacking the opponent. One frets excessively about how the opponent will respond and how the media will write it up. The other, more aggressive mindset doesn’t worry too much about those things, on the principle that playing offense is almost always better than playing defense. I raise this with respect to the specific question of whether President Obama is going to make attacks on Republican obstructionism part of his arsenal over the next two months. His advisors seem to think that doing so would make Obama look weak. I emphatically disagree, and I think he’ll be dragged into doing it anyway, as he already was. Let’s review the tape.
On Wednesday night, Bill Clinton ripped into the congressional GOP: “[Obama] also tried to work with Congressional Republicans on health care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn’t work out so well. Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their No. 1 priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work. Senator, I hate to break it to you, but we’re going to keep President Obama on the job!” It was then that he delivered that line about the GOP’s message in Tampa: we made the mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so put us back in.
I was elated to hear that obstructionism had made it to the convention podium, and from its best and most authoritative speaker no less. I hoped this meant that it would become a theme. Let me pause in the chronology to say why. It’s simple. The vast majority of the people blame the president for the sputtering economy. After all, he’s the president. They elected him to fix things, so dammit, fix things. Most people’s political analysis doesn’t go beyond this. They think the president can just … do stuff.
Sometimes, the president can. It is certainly true that Obama had a little more than a year, from Al Franken’s swearing in in July 2009 (which gave the Democrats the magic 60 Senate seats) until September 2010 (when Congress recessed to hit the campaign trail) when he should have been able to do stuff. He did health care. But he, and they, didn’t do economy. The idea of stimulus had been so soiled by then that they didn’t have the votes even among Democrats—partly, to be sure, their own fault for mishandling the stimulus argument the first time around.
But for most of his term, especially on the economy, the Republicans blocked everything. Most people don’t understand that 41 votes in the Senate equal an effective majority because of their collective power to stop any action in its tracks, and most people never will. But the fact is that those 41, if they link arms and stand firm, have more power than the president. Indeed: That old chestnut “the president proposes, and Congress disposes” was originally appropriated from the age-old apothegm “man proposeth, but God disposeth.” Congress is God. At least on domestic policy. But try to tell an average American that in the age of the imperial presidency.
Back to the chronology. As I said, I expected to hear Biden and Obama pick up on Clinton’s attack. Neither did, at least in any meaningful way. Obama didn’t mention, for example, his 2011 jobs bill. Ezra Klein wrote yesterday that the Obama team appears to have decided “to refrain from reminding voters how bad things are and to resist using the campaign as an opportunity to continue pushing emergency measures that congressional Republicans implacably oppose.”
Well, I disagree, but OK, if that’s your decision, that’s your decision. But then, the day after the convention, after the poor jobs numbers came out, what did Obama talk about in New Hampshire? GOP opposition to his jobs bill! So which strategy is it?
Obama may not want to remind voters how bad things are, but they don’t need reminding. They know. And given that they know, the smart and aggressive thing to do is to call out the people who’ve been blocking attempts at progress. Reality is going to force him to do it anyway.
One of the Democrats’ biggest strategic mistakes of the last two years has been their unwillingness to say plainly and openly that Republicans don’t want to see jobs created as long as Obama is president. Chuck Schumer tried it a couple of summers ago. Other Democrats were just afraid to go there. The White House too. And this was even after Mitch McConnell more or less admitted it in public! It was a classic case of worrying about the how opposition would respond and how the media would cover it instead of just playing offense.
Others say he should just train his sights on Mitt Romney, but I think it’s much stronger to tie them all together. Paul Ryan’s presence on the ticket, and Romney’s endorsement of Ryan’s budget, places these slippery fish in the same malodorous kettle. And finally, there is value in simply being seen as fighting. Imagine if Obama called out Mitch McConnell personally for that infamous comment of his. The base would be in heaven, and voters in the middle would at least see him standing up for himself, not letting himself get kicked around. Yes, it would be incautious. I submit that the time is right for a little incaution.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 9, 2012
“Truly Transformative”: Why The Stimulus Made America Better Off Four Years Later
President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on February 17, 2009, with the hopes of jump-starting a depressed U.S. economy and initiating his agenda for healthcare, energy, and education. Larger in constant dollars than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Obama’s stimulus is one of the most misunderstood pieces of legislation in U.S. history, says Time journalist Michael Grunwald. The author of The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era recently spoke to U.S. News about why Republicans were so successful in their campaign against the bill, and why Americans don’t understand how truly transformative it was. Excerpts:
Why did Obama pursue the Recovery Act?
The economy had fallen off a cliff, and in the past, this idea that when the private sector shuts down, the public sector needs to step up was totally uncontroversial. Bush had passed a stimulus bill with overwhelming bipartisan support when the economy started to go soft in 2008. All the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates had their own stimulus plans in 2008. Mitt Romney’s was actually the largest. And House Republicans, including Paul Ryan, voted in 2009 for a $715 billion alternative to the stimulus that was quite similar to President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus. It was never really clear how the Republican plan could be good public policy and how Obama’s pretty similar policy was radical socialism.
While the Recovery Act was partly about recovery, it was also really the purest distillation of what Obama meant when he talked about change we can believe in, in terms of transforming energy, starting to reduce healthcare costs, reforming education with things like Race to the Top, and then the largest infrastructure investments, the largest middle-class tax cuts since Reagan, the largest research investments ever. That’s the new New Deal.
Why does the stimulus have such a bad rap?
First, you have to say that the Republicans did a brilliant job of completely distorting the substance of the bill. They turned this into an $800 billion boondoggle that was full of levitating trains to Disneyland and mob museums and snow-making machines in Duluth and all kinds of nonsense that wasn’t actually in the bill. They’ve been very disciplined and unified in portraying this as just a big mess. This thing was just hard to sell at a time when the financial earthquake had hit but the economic tsunami hadn’t reached the shore. It wasn’t like when FDR took office after three years of depression, so everybody knew it was Hoover’s depression. But Obama took office during a freefall, and January 2009 was the worst month for job losses. And then he passed the stimulus, and then the next quarter was the biggest jobs improvement in 30 years, but it improved from absolutely hideous to just bad, and it’s hard to sell a jobs bill when the job situation is bad.
What was the value of programs that weren’t necessarily shovel-ready?
After a financial meltdown, the recoveries are always going to be long and slow. That’s one reason the money was spread out over several years. Right up front they wrote big checks to states to help governors balance their budgets without doing mass layoffs of public employees and mass cutbacks of Medicaid spending on the poor. Tax cuts went out quickly to get money into people’s pockets. So all that stuff was obviously shovel-ready; you just shovel the money out the door. Then you had some stuff that really wasn’t supposed to be all that shovel-ready at all, like building the world’s largest wind farm or bringing our pen-and-paper healthcare system into the digital age, or building high-speed rail lines. It was always understood that those were going to take longer. The idea was that even if it wasn’t shovel-ready, it was shovel-worthy.
How are Republicans using the stimulus against President Obama?
Republicans had always supported stimulus up until January 20, 2009, and most of what’s in the stimulus were things that had always enjoyed plenty of bipartisan support. Highway spending and unemployment benefits and middle-class tax cuts and even clean energy, but of course Republicans had decided before that that they were in absolute lock-step opposition. They couldn’t have clean bipartisan support. They had to portray him as a radical partisan.
Why should Mitt Romney read this book?
What Republicans can learn from this is that a lot of the things they’ve been trashing as big government nonsense have actually had an effect.
Are Americans better off than they were four years ago?
I think the answer is yes. What people forget is just how catastrophic our situation was four years ago. Gaining 150,000 jobs isn’t that great, but it’s way better than losing 800,000. And that’s always going to be the difficulty for Obama: selling the notion that things could have been worse, and that things were worse.
By: Teresa Welsh, U. S. News and World Report, September 7, 2012
“A Sensible Plan, An Obstructionist GOP”: The American Jobs Act One Year Later
On September 8, 2011 — exactly one year ago tomorrow — President Obama delivered an important speech to a joint session of Congress. In it, the president unveiled a proposal he called the American Jobs Act.
You may recall the economic circumstances at the time, and how similar they are to 2012 — though job growth looked strong in the early months of the year, the summer proved disappointing. Obama sought to shift the national conversation away from austerity and towards job creation, and presented a sensible plan, filled with ideas that have traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support.
Independent analysis projected the American Jobs Act, which was fully paid for, could create as many as 2 million jobs in 2012.
I mention this now because what happened a year ago is incredibly relevant to what’s happening now. This morning’s jobs report was disappointing, and we know exactly how the political world will digest the news — if the job market is underperforming, it’s Obama who’ll get the blame.
There’s not much I can do to change the course of that conversation, but if we’re going to play the blame game, we should at least try to keep some semblance of reality in mind.
The American electorate was clamoring for action on jobs; the Obama White House crafted a credible plan that would be helping enormously right now; and congressional Republicans reflexively killed the Americans Jobs Act for partisan and ideological reasons.
With this recent history in mind, how are we to assign responsibility for high unemployment? Should we condemn the person who threw the job market a life preserver, or those who pushed it away? Or put another way, are we better off now as a result of Republican obstructionism and intransigence, or would we have been better off if the popular and effective job-creation measures had been approved?
By any reasonable measure, the GOP argument, which will be trumpeted loudly today, is completely incoherent — they were wrong a year ago and now we’re paying the price.
As we talked about in June, for Republicans, when there’s discouraging economic news, Obama deserves all the blame. When there’s good economic news, Obama deserves none of the credit. Job losses in 2010 were Obama’s fault; job gains in early 2011 and 2012 have nothing do to with Obama; and tepid growth in the spring of 2012 are back to being Obama’s fault again.
Remember learning the “heads I win, tails you lose” game as a kid? It’s the GOP’s argument in a nutshell — whether the president deserves credit or blame for a monthly jobs report is due entirely to whether the report is encouraging or not.
But even this doesn’t go far enough in explaining the absurdity on display. If we’re going to assign blame to Washington policymakers for the state of the nation’s job market, how is it, exactly, that Congress bears no responsibility at all? This is, after all, a Republican-led Congress that has plenty of time to fight a culture war — I’ve lost count of the anti-abortion bills that have reached the House floor — but has shown passive disinterest to the jobs crisis.
Follow this pattern of events:
1. With the job market struggling, Obama unveils the American Jobs Act, a State of the Union agenda filled with economic measures, and an economic “to-do list.”
2. Republican lawmakers ignore the proposals, and the job market deteriorates.
3. The GOP then blames Obama for the failure his policies, which Congress didn’t pass.
The accepted truth this morning is that weak job numbers are absolute, concrete, incontrovertible proof that the president’s jobs agenda isn’t working. News flash: we aren’t trying Obama’s jobs agenda.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 7, 2012
“The Obama Exception”: Why The “Are You Better Off” Line Won’t Work For Republicans
Martin O’Malley, Maryland’s very ambitious Democratic governor, stepped in it a bit on Sunday when he said that Americans aren’t better off today than they were four years ago.
It was a dream sound bite for Republicans, who seem convinced that swing voters will ultimately turn on President Obama if they feel the same way. Not surprisingly, Obama’s team moved quickly to provide a different answer, and O’Malley has since said that he thinks Americans are “clearly better off” now.
This illustrates the tricky spot Obama is in. He obviously can’t run the kind of feel good reelection campaign that every incumbent president dreams of, and he risks seeming like he’s trying to spin away the very real anxiety millions of Americans still feel whenever he claims his policies are working or highlights an encouraging economic statistic. But staying mute is hardly an option; doing so would concede the point and make it that much easier for Romney’s team to argue that Obama is a failed president.
And so, O’Malley’s comment aside, Democrats have settled on a message similar to what Brad Woodhouse, the DNC’s communications director, said on CNN this morning:
The truth is though is that the American people know. I mean, we were literally a plane that was heading — the trajectory was towards the ground when the president took over. He got the stick, he’s pulled us up out of that decline.
We were losing 800,000 jobs a month. Lost 3.5 millions, Americans I know have not forgotten, we lost 3.5 million jobs in the last six months of the Bush administration. We gained 4.5 million jobs over the past two and a half years.
So if you just put those side by side, clearly we’re better off. However, we have a long way to go.
Context isn’t an easy sell in politics, especially since there’s usually little room for collective memory or foresight in mass opinion. But Obama’s argument may be an exception, because polls consistently show that Americans do remember what happened four years ago – who was president when the economy melted down, how severe and terrifying the fallout was, and how impossible the situation that Obama inherited was. There is evidence that memories of George W. Bush have translated into a benefit-of-the-doubt effect for Obama, leaving him in better political shape than in incumbent president in this economic climate should be.
This is why, as Greg Sargent argued Sunday, Romney’s team may be miscalculating in depending so much on economic anxiety to push swing voters into their camp. They have the examples of 1992 and 1980, the last two times incumbent presidents were defeated for reelection, in mind, but those situations were different. The “Are you better off?” question, in fact, was basically invented in ’80, when Ronald Reagan employed it to devastating effect in his debate with Jimmy Carter. The line worked so well because inflation had nearly tripled on Carter’s watch, and unemployment had climbed nearly two points in the 18 months before the election. To the casual voter, the answer to Reagan’s question was simple and obvious. There was no room for context.
It was the same in 1992. The unemployment rate had been around 5 percent when George H.W. Bush took office, but by the summer of his reelection year it had spiked to nearly 8 percent. The fall brought some signs of improvement, but it was too late for the incumbent. It sure seemed like something had happened on Bush’s watch to hurt an economy that had been working pretty well when he came to power.
This is a much different election. The economy was in a freefall that hadn’t been seen since FDR’s days as Obama was taking the oath of office. If the Wall Street meltdown had played out in September 2009, Obama probably wouldn’t be getting much benefit of the doubt now. But it played out in September 2008, at the end of a presidency that the overwhelming majority of voters had decided was a disaster. This doesn’t mean Obama is in the clear; the polls are close, and even if he wins, it will probably be by a narrow margin. But “Are you better off?” doesn’t automatically undermine him the way it did with Carter and Bush 41.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, September 3, 2012
“Do Republicans Really Want To Compare?”: America Is Definitely Better Off Under Obama
Republicans seem to have hit on a question that has Team Obama fumbling, or at least squirming: Are you better off now than four years ago? Judging by my E-mail inbox yesterday, it’s a question Republicans seem genuinely interested in pursuing. Please do, GOP. It’s a trap.
I say this for two reasons. The first is factual, the second political.
On the matter of facts, when President Obama took office in January 2009, the economy was shedding 800,000 jobs per month. Stop for a second and read that again: 800,000 jobs lost per month. The economy has now added private sector jobs for 29 months running.
Does that mean that things are good? Not at all. The topline unemployment figure has worsened even as the overall economy has improved, and we still haven’t emerged from the jobs crater wrought by the Great Recession. But middling job growth is indisputably better than economic free fall.
More: As Time’s Michael Grunwald points out the economy shrank by an annual rate of 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008. At that rate, Grunwald writes, “we would have shed the entire Canadian economy in 2009.” Grunwald, who has written a book on Obama’s stimulus, goes on to make a pretty good thumbnail case about why that jobs plan did in fact work, as well as generally why Obama and his advocates have a lot to be proud of—the post is worth a read.
But it brings me to my second point—why the GOP is walking into a trap if they pursue the “better off” question. Look back at the figures quoted above: 800,000 jobs lost per month; an 8.9 percent annual contraction rate. Is that really the point of comparison to which Mitt Romney and the Republicans want to draw Americans’ attention? Please. Please!
Republicans constantly whine about President Obama pointing to the dreadful circumstances of his ascension to the Oval Office—but now they want to invite the comparison? Really? Really!
I understand that the president and his team have to toe this line carefully—we’re still digging out from George W. Bush’s recession. But Jon Favreau and the presidential speechwriting staff, are you paying attention? If the GOP wants to ask whether the country is better off than it was four years ago, then the answer is a no-brainer yes, and I can’t think of a better person or place to give that answer than Barack Obama on Thursday night.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, Washington Whispers, September 3, 2012
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