This will be a short post. The National Gallery is open 11am - 6pm Sundays, and I intend to get there with time to spare.
The Stimulus was a missed opportunity for Obama to lead his own party while attempting to lead the nation. That said, Republicans miscalculate by nearly categorically rejecting it.
The mistake Obama made came early, before he was President, when he signaled that he wanted (would want) a stimulus plan ready and waiting for him on day one of his presidency. Then, once he was elected, but before he was inaugurated, he reiterated that statement with greater clarity and urgency. Since the clarion call for a stimulus was made before Obama was ready (both in terms of being elected, and once elected, having his financial team together and ready to go), its construction was necessarily left to others, in this case to Nancy Pelosi (since all appropriations bills, under the Constitution, must start in the House), someone President Obama knows leads the left wing of the Democratic party (not the center wing Bill Clinton developed and enlarged) and would surely draft a bill left of what he wanted and the American people wanted, since the American center is right of the Democratic center, though not by much. That's a long sentence, I realize, but its message is one nuclear thought - that Barack Obama, as he has told us many times, and I for one now believe him, wants to govern effectively and well from the American center, that his administration does and will not take ideological stands, but govern from the standpoint of what works, that he expects intermim results of his policies to be graded, and if not succeeding, then other policies to replace them, and that he does not care where those policies come from, or traditionally whether they fall into a Republican or Democratic camp. He's approaching it like a basketball game - he wants to win. He wants this country to win. He doesn't want to play some elegant or theoretical strategy that loses. And yet in Round One - the Stimulus - he handed over the head coaching job to Nancy Pelosi, and the Stimulus bill and Mr. Obama's presidency, and along with that, the country, are the worse off for it.
That said, the Stimulus is not an utter travesty, and Republicans should have supported it in greater numbers. They acted petulantly to the fact that Nancy Pelosi drove the process. Hello! - She's Speaker - and she's Nancy Pelosi! What did they expect her to do? Be inclusive? And to flip back to the key message of the previous paragraph, this is the key opportunity Barack Obama missed, and I think he missed it in a way which was perhaps unavoidable for the reasons I mentioned (not yet being President, etc, when events in the economy made it necessary for him to recommend and call for a significant stimulus bill). But the opportunity missed is this, and no one knows this better than Bill Clinton, that the Democratic caucus is currently left of him and left of the country, and that he will need to confront Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid most specifically, and the left in his party more generally, as Bill Clinton had to when faced with the same problem, and bring them kicking and screaming if necessary in line with himself. And if he does not, if he does not confront them, and if necessary threaten both Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid with presidential vetoes should they craft important legislation which is left of him and left of the country, then he will not be a great president, he will not match much less surpass Bill Clinton, and he will very likely inhabit the White House for only one term. All during the presidential campaign, Congress had approval ratings best described as on life-support, even lower than President Bush's. People did not go to the polls and the Nationial Mall on inauguration day in record numbers to show their enthusiastic support for the Congress; rather, for Barack Obama. If, in four years, the American people feel as though he ceded leadership at too many turns to the Congress, if he allows what's happened with the Stimulus bill to be replayed on too many other issues and too many other occasions, then he will not be re-elected, and his approval ratings over time will move towards those for Congress.
Finally, the reason why Republicans are super dumb (I know, sophisticated of me, but dumb begets dumb) for not supporting this bill is that economists right, left, and center are saying there is a time-criticality to our current economic woes, and they look through a great body of historical economic evidence both in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, particularly Japan, in making that claim. Yes, there are individual detractors. The Congressional Budget Office, for one, but even there you have to understand clearly what they said. They said the current Stimulus would have an initial stimulative effect and add jobs, but that in ten years time the net effect would be negative due to the increase in the deficit and its crowding out of investment, other spending, etc. This is because they have to grade the bill as is. But the Obama administration will not be standing still during that ten years. If they do as they said during the campaign, and with red pen go through the federal budget line by line, and once economic disaster has been averted begin deep cuts in government spending, and a raising of certain tax rates so long as the economy is strong enough to withstand that, and use all of those savings and increased revenues to offset and pay down the deficit, and ultimately the debt (which obviously can't happen until we return to annual budget surpluses...if we return...Lord help us...), then the game will have changed, and with that, CBO's predictions.
Where Republicans are particularly cynical and have no credibility is that discretionary spending skyrocketed with a Republican President, and right up until they lost their majority in the House in 2006. On top of that, they spent like any defense contractor would ever want or hope for them to on two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan funded entirely by us! Do you know what our bill was from the first Gulf war? Zilch! We provided the manpower and other countries picked up the tab. That's the benefit you get when you don't go it alone. President Bush didn't have time for forging those kinds of relationships and commitments. Besides, you let someone pay for something, pretty soon they want a voice in what's happening on the ground (no one knows this better than the government), and he, Cheney, the generals, and others didn't want to be bothered with that. Too much hard work for them? Yes, in a way. It's all in what hard work appeals to you. Bush, Cheney and company took on the very hard work of fighting a war in Iraq, but ignored the hard diplomatic work required which just might have saved this country billions of dollars in debt now and over several decades (if you include VA bills and interest). And, in the midst of all of it, knowing he was about to spend billions, he cut taxes by $2 trillion dollars WITHOUT cutting a dollar from the budget. Translation: He and the Congressional Republicans who supported him, and en masse did not support this stimulus, many, principly, because it raises the debt, knowingly added $2 trillion to the national debt in one tax-cut bill!... and $6 trillion over his presidency! And now these same Republicans are crying about the effects of the Stimulus on the deficit during a time of economic crisis. It's cynical and it's wrong.
The Stimulus bill could be better but it is good enough. Folks acknowledge the formula for a good stimulus is a mix of things, but in that mix, these: (1) an injection of cash right into the economy to jump-start consumption - tax cuts are good for this, and 40% of the Stimulus is tax cuts (and still Republicans don't support it); (2) short-term government spending to jump-start job creation and also consumption - 30% of the spending is short-term, and the reason why it's not more is two-fold, (a) it's actually difficult to spend too large a sum of money too quickly, and (b) you don't want short-term spending to be too large, because it generates jobs which likely only exist for the period of the spending, then go away, so they are not a good long-term investment; and (3) long-term government spending on infrastructure, technological research, and education - the remaining 70% of the spending; note that it takes years to build a bridge or a road or develop a brand new technology or educate our children and the next great minds, but these things push out the production possibilities curve (in economists' speak) and lay the groundwork for a larger, wealthier, more competitive economy, with rising wages. So the bill gets those proportions just about right - 40% tax cuts, 30% short-term spending, 70% long-term spending. Does it have some sidebar crap in it? YES! If Barack Obama had driven the process from the start, would it still? Hopefully NOT! But the bill is good enough. And if economists are right, and time is critical to avoid Japan, avoid the 1930s, then this billed needed to pass, and Republicans needed to support it. It's to their continuing demise that they did not.
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