“From ‘Lame Duck’ To ‘Fourth Quarter'”: One For The History Books, As President Obama Plays Through To The End Of The Game
It seems to me that the job of political scientists is to identify patterns in political history as a way to predict the future. One of those patterns that has been pretty generally accepted is that once a presidential campaign begins to replace a second-termer, the White House occupant goes into “lame duck” status. That is certainly what everyone was expecting from President Obama after the huge losses Democrats suffered in the 2014 midterms.
But as we all know by now, the President decided he’d start a new pattern…one that saw his remaining two years as a “fourth quarter” in which he vowed to play to the end. His success in being able to do that hinged on several factors.
1. A scandal-free presidency
During my lifetime, no two-term president has managed to escape the drag of either scandal or terribly flawed policies at the end of their second term. Johnson had Vietnam. Nixon had Watergate. Reagan had Iran/Contra. Clinton had impeachment. Bush had the war in Iraq and the Great Recession.
Recently David Brooks noted that the current administration is the exception to that pattern.
I have my disagreements, say, with President Obama, but President Obama has run an amazingly scandal-free administration, not only he himself, but the people around him. He’s chosen people who have been pretty scandal-free.
That means that not only does the President maintain the good will of most Americans, but he doesn’t have to devote an inordinate amount of time to defending himself or attempting to fix policy failures.
2. Previous work is bearing fruit
Last December President Obama sat down for an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep. In response to questions about some of the bold moves he’d already taken since the 2014 midterms, the President said this:
But at the end of 2014, I could look back and say we are as well-positioned today as we have been in quite some time economically, that American leadership is more needed around the world than ever before — and that is liberating in the sense that a lot of the work that we’ve done is now beginning to bear fruit. And it gives me an opportunity then to start focusing on some of the other hard challenges that I didn’t always have the time or the capacity to get to earlier in my presidency.
The major things he is referring to are that the economy was recovering, healthcare reform was working and ground troops were out of both Iraq and Afghanistan. But in addition to all that, diplomacy had opened the doors in Cuba, brought Iran to the negotiating table and led to an agreement with China about climate change.
3. Pen and phone strategy
A lot of the assumption about President Obama’s pending lame duckness had to do with the intransigence of Congress that was only bolstered by the 2014 midterms. But in January of 2014, the President instructed his Cabinet to bring him ideas he could implement via executive order or through persuasion with business leaders and local/state governments. Thus began his “pen and phone” strategy that led to everything from DAPA to new rules for overtime pay to working with local governments to provide paid sick/family leave.
4. Big events
Political pundits are often guilty of assuming that whatever is happening today will be a permanent narrative. But national/international events have a way of changing the current dynamic. Nowhere has that been more evident than the handwringing over President Obama’s assumed irrelevance when House Democrats handed him a “humiliating” defeat on TPA a couple of weeks ago. We all know how that one turned out. Just as the House and Senate re-grouped to pass TPA, the events in Charleston, SC were unfolding and the Supreme Court was preparing to hand down rulings affirming Obamacare, marriage equality and disparate impact. As Michael Cohen wrote, we’ve recently been witness to ten days that turned America Into a better place. From an affirmation of his policies to his Amazing Grace eulogy, President Obama has been front and center on it all.
But big events can help or hurt a presidency. The lesson we should all learn from their recent trajectory is that things can change in a heartbeat. President Obama still has a year and a half to go. There are a few things we know are coming up, like whether or not he is able to work with Iran and P5+1 to reach a deal on nuclear weapons. This December we’ll learn whether or not the agreements the Obama administration has crafted with countries like China, India and now Brazil will lead to an international agreement on climate change at the UN Conference in Paris. Both of those would be historic achievements. And then, of course, there are the unknown events that could be on the horizon.
This may very well be the first time in the modern era that a sitting president has as much influence on a presidential campaign as any of the candidates who are running for office. The increasing size of the clown car on the Republican side means that it might be months before any one candidate is able to break through all the noise. That leaves the stage pretty wide open for a Democratic message. And Hillary Clinton has wisely chosen to run with President Obama and his record rather than against it. That means she’s looking pretty good right about now.
Whatever happens, this will be one for the history books as lame duckness is tossed aside and President Obama plays through to the end of the fourth quarter.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 1, 2015
“The Great National ‘Franksgiving’ Uproar”: Imagine The Reaction If Obama Used An Executive Order To Change Date Of A Major Holiday
The story of Franklin Roosevelt moving Thanksgiving is probably pretty well known, but with the holiday coming up tomorrow, and with the ongoing debate about executive powers apparently fresh on the political world’s mind, it’s probably worth a trip down memory lane.
Historically, Thanksgiving was celebrated on the final Thursday of November. But in 1939, with the nation still dealing with the effects of the Great Depression and the unemployment rate above 15%, there was a small problem with the calendar: Thanksgiving fell on Nov. 30.
This may not sound especially important, but for businesses relying on holiday sales, this was a threat to bottom lines – it shortened the number of shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Business owners, pointing to the weak economy, demanded action.
And FDR delivered, issuing an executive order that moved the official date of Thanksgiving up a week, from Nov. 30 to Nov. 23. As Andrew Prokop explained, this really didn’t go over well.
What may have seemed like a wonkish, technocratic, good-government policy clashed with what turned out to be deeply-ingrained feelings among many Americans about when Thanksgiving should be celebrated. The Associated Press story announcing the move said Roosevelt “was shattering another precedent,” and quoted a town official of Plymouth, Massachusetts saying the traditional date was “sacred.” […]
Republicans pounced, and used the move to portray Roosevelt as a power-mad tyrant. In an early example of Godwin’s Law, FDR’s recent presidential opponent Alf Landon said Roosevelt sprung his decision on “an unprepared country with the omnipotence of a Hitler.” Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire suggested that while Roosevelt was at it, he should abolish winter.
One Republican mayor labeled the new date “Franksgiving.” Extending the protest further, roughly half the states chose to honor the old date rather than the new one.
The date then bounced around for a couple of years, until Congress eventually passed a new law, moving the date from the final Thursday in November to the fourth Thursday in November.
So, FDR and businesses owners scored a partial win, at least insofar as the Nov. 30 problem is concerned.
The thing I like about this story now is its contemporary salience: President Obama, for example, is not the first Democratic president that Republicans compared to Hitler.
Plus, try to imagine the reaction if Obama used an executive order to change the date of a major holiday without congressional approval. If his critics go berserk when he uses prosecutorial discretion on immigration, Republicans might very well faint if Thanksgiving moved to create more shopping days.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 27, 2014
“Ignore The Prophets Of Economic Doom”: Why The Government Should Help The Unemployed Even If It Might Not Work
The United States is now starting its sixth year of mass unemployment, a grinding economic disaster that shows no sign of relenting. As Brad DeLong has written, very soon our current mess will result in something worse than the Great Depression: “Future economic historians will not regard the Great Depression as the worst business-cycle disaster of the industrial age. It is we who are living in their worst case.” (Though the Depression was deeper, the U.S. economy recovered much more quickly.)
That is the context in which we should look at a new spate of pessimistic economic arguments about the future. On Tuesday, the famed economist Robert Gordon released a new paper arguing that future economic growth will be awful.
Here’s a section from Gordon’s abstract:
This paper predicts that growth in the 25 to 40 years after 2007 will be much slower, particularly for the great majority of the population… The primary cause of this growth slowdown is a set of four headwinds, all of them widely recognized and uncontroversial. Demographic shifts will reduce hours worked per capita… Educational attainment, a central driver of growth over the past century, stagnates at a plateau… Inequality continues to increase, resulting in real income growth for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution that is fully half a point per year below the average growth of all incomes. [NBER]
This may be right and it may not. (Personally, I’m not at all convinced — see Kevin Drum and Tyler Cowen for a good discussion.) But the great danger is that these predictions could be self-fulfilling, discouraging Congress from taking immediate action in the face of economic trends that will overwhelm its comparatively puny efforts.
What we must remember is that there is a strong case that additional effort could solve at least part of our mass unemployment problem at low cost. We owe it to ourselves and our fellow citizens to try to restore full employment, even if it might not work.
The case against the stagnationist position goes something like this: America is not primarily suffering economically because of the factors Gordon pointed out. Rather, as during the Great Depression, we’ve suffered a collapse of aggregate demand, and institutional arrangements and political gridlock prevent us from fully addressing the problem through monetary or fiscal stimulus. This dynamic is also quite similar to that of the Great Depression — it took World War II to break through the political gridlock and get enough deficit spending to restore full employment.
If the stagnationists are right, then government attempts to restore employment with monetary or fiscal stimulus will result in little more than inflation. But they might be wrong, and the relative downside risks to their positions aren’t even close to comparable. A bit of moderate inflation is no big deal — it came in at around 4 percent during most of Reagan’s term, and the Fed has the tools to easily rein inflation back in if it rises above the central bank’s target rate of 2 percent. In fact, a little inflation could even help matters, by eroding household debt burdens and reducing real interest rates.
On the other hand, mass unemployment is an ongoing economic and humanitarian catastrophe.
It’s like if your house is on fire, and you’re worried that spraying it with a firehose might break some windows. Maybe true! Also a terrible set of priorities!
So whether Gordon and others have a good theoretical case for their pessimism is not remotely enough to justify inaction on unemployment. Policymakers should keep that at the front of their mind.
By: Ryan Cooer, The Week, February 19, 2014
“At The Top, There Is No Crisis”: Why A Never-Ending Disaster For 90 Percent Of America Doesn’t Worry The GOP
We’re in the middle of the worst economic disaster in modern history and we’re doing almost nothing about it, warns UC Berkeley Economist J. Bradford DeLong.
“So unless something — and it will need to be something major — returns the U.S. to its pre-2008 growth trajectory, future economic historians will not regard the Great Depression as the worst business-cycle disaster of the industrial age,” he writes. “It is we who are living in their worst case.”
The former Clinton administration official wonders why a disaster that “robs the average American family of four of $36,000 per year in useful goods and services, and that threatens to keep Americans poorer than they might have been for decades,” isn’t motivating policymakers to act.
“One would think that America’s leaders would be clambering to formulate policies aimed at returning the economy to its pre-2008 growth path: putting people back to work, cleaning up underwater mortgages, restoring financial markets’ risk-bearing capacity, and boosting investment,” he says.
Instead, Congress is debating about how much our investments should be reduced, how few weeks we should help the unemployed, how much food stamps should be cut.
The reason why we aren’t acting is clear to DeLong: “…at the top, there is no crisis.” While the incomes of the bottom 90 percent have stagnated for decades, the top has flourished. “The incomes of America’s top 10 percent are two-thirds higher than those of their counterparts 20 years ago, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have more than doubled,” he writes.
This inequality isn’t an accident of history or the result of rapid technological advancement, as conservatives like to pretend.
It’s the result of the class war the right has been waging for decades.
“Among developed countries, the U.S. does have the most unequal distribution of disposable income after taxes and transfer payments,” writes economist Laura Tyson, former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Our tax system is more progressive than most European countries that rely on a value-added tax but we spend far less on programs that help families and keep inequality low.
This is the victory of a conservative movement that caters to the richest Americans and seems to have no problem with a recovery that is only benefiting the richest 10 percent. Actually, it seeks to maintain the advantage for the richest by opposing policies like Medicaid expansion and assailing the labor movement.
The Republican Party doesn’t even feel the need to bother with solutions to problems that plague the lower 90 percent, like unemployment, says New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait.
“Republican thought on mass unemployment is a restaurant with tiny portions that taste terrible,” he writes.
The problem for the left is that Republicans can run and win on policies that directly increase income inequality. They can resist Democratic initiatives — even wildly popular ideas like raising the minimum wage, which would reduce poverty and increase consumer spending — and still be on track to hold the House of Representatives, while possibly even wining the Senate.
Why doesn’t the Republican Party act to reverse the greatest economic disaster in at least half a century, a disaster they could prevent?
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) can reveal his secret passion for alleviating poverty over and over again while promoting policies that increase it. And still be taken seriously.
Republicans don’t care about improving the economy for the bottom 90 percent for one simple reason.
They don’t have to.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, January 1, 2014
“Congress Lacks Courage And Vision”: FDR Put Humanity First, The Sequester Puts It Last
FDR placed the needs of the American people above petty budgetary concerns, but today’s leaders lack his courage and vision.
In 1933 we reversed the policy of the previous Administration. For the first time since the depression you had a Congress and an Administration in Washington which had the courage to provide the necessary resources which private interests no longer had or no longer dared to risk.
This cost money. We knew, and you knew, in March, 1933, that it would cost money. We knew, and you knew, that it would cost money for several years to come. The people understood that in 1933. They understood it in 1934, when they gave the Administration a full endorsement of its policy. They knew in 1935, and they know in 1936, that the plan is working.—FDR, 1936
Eighty years ago this month, at the height of the worst economic crisis in our nation’s history, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered on his promise to launch a New Deal for the American people. Not wedded to any one program, idea, or ideology, the New Deal was founded on the very simple premise that when the free market failed to provide basic economic security for the average American, government had a responsibility to provide that security. In Roosevelt’s day, this meant imposing the first-ever meaningful regulation of the stock market, shoring up the nation’s financial system by guaranteeing private deposits and separating commercial from investment banking, and providing jobs to the millions of unemployed through government expenditures on infrastructure. The Roosevelt administration also launched the country’s first nationwide program of unemployment insurance to help the unemployed bridge the gap between jobs as well as Social Security to ensure that the elderly, after years of work and toil, would not suddenly find themselves utterly destitute.
Conservative critics of FDR’s polices say that these programs did not work—that unemployment remained high throughout the 1930s and that it was only World War II that brought us out of the Great Depression. As such, these same critics continually argue that the deficit spending that fueled the New Deal was the root cause of its inability to bring the unemployment rate down to acceptable levels. In short, they argue that government spending and government programs do not work, and that only the free market can provide the economic stimulus necessary to get the economy back on its feet again.
But as is the case today with the naysayers on climate change, the empirical evidence suggests that nothing could be further from the truth. During FDR’s first term, for example, the average annual growth rate for the U.S. economy was 11 percent. Compare that to the paltry 0.8 percent we witnessed in the first term of the Obama administration. The nationwide unemployment rate also fell, from its all-time high of 25 percent in 1933 to 14 percent by 1935, which at the time represented the largest and fastest drop in unemployment in our nation’s history.
But far more damning to the conservative critique is the argument that tries to invalidate the New Deal by positing that it was World War II and not the relief programs of the 1930s that brought us out of the Great Depression. Conservatives love to trumpet this fact and often use it as part of their argument against deficit spending, never stopping for a moment to consider that government expenditures—and deficits—in World War II made the New Deal look like small potatoes. In fact, deficit spending in the New Deal never topped 6 percent of GNP, while in World War II it ran as high as 28 percent. In other words, World War II was the New Deal on steroids. Viewed from this perspective, it is FDR’s critics on the left—not the right—who possess the stronger argument. The problem with the New Deal was that it did not go far enough. In other words, the government should have spent more money, not less, if it was going to be successful in bringing the economic crisis to an end.
All this is not to say that free enterprise is incapable of producing economic growth—it most certainly is. But there are times when capitalism, left to its own devices, can fail. Franklin Roosevelt was willing to acknowledge this, and he spent the better part of his tenure in office trying to put in place programs that would make capitalism work for the average American, not just those at the top. Hence, his agenda was not to subvert or destroy the free market system, but rather to save it.
It took vision and courage to launch the New Deal—the vision to understand that when the free market systems falls short or fails, government has a responsibility to take direct measures to get the economy moving again, and the courage to engage in deficit spending at a time when orthodox economic theory argued that the only proper response to an economic recession or depression was to slash government spending and balance the budget.
Unfortunately, the leadership we possess in Washington today lacks the vision and the courage to follow FDR’s example and put in place the sort of common-sense programs that would stimulate the economy and put people back to work. Instead of providing jobs for millions by spending money on our failing infrastructure—now ranked 24th in the world—or investing in programs that would reverse the falling education rates of our children, or providing greater federal support for the basic scientific research that may unlock untold benefits for future generations, we instead speak of nothing but the deficit and the sequester, as if cutting spending in the midst of recession is the magic bullet that will lead us out of our economic malaise.
Franklin Roosevelt faced similar critics, who, much like today’s deficit hawks, insisted that he must cut spending and balance the budget no matter what the consequences for the average American. But FDR would have none of this. “To balance our budget in 1933 or 1934 or 1935,” he said,
would have been a crime against the American people. To do so we should either have had to make a capital levy that would have been confiscatory, or we should have had to set our face against human suffering with callous indifference. When Americans suffered, we refused to pass by on the other side. Humanity came first.
As it turns out, FDR’s decision to put “humanity first” was not only the right moral decision, it was also the right economic decision. For the deficit spending that he finally unleashed in World War II, coupled with the social and economic reforms put in place during the New Deal, led to one of the longest periods of economic prosperity in America’s history and the birth of the modern American middle class.
Sadly, all of the evidence to date suggests that our leaders in Washington are quite happy “to pass by on the other side” and let the sequester proceed without so much as a fight. With roughly 16 million people across the country still unemployed, this is surely “a crime against the American people.”
By: David Woolner, The National Memo, March 3, 2013
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