Steve Benen is completely right about this:
Be on the lookout for this one — as the economy improves and the Bush Recession ends, Republicans will try to convince people that Bush, not Obama, deserves credit for rescuing the economy. While the evidence is overwhelming that it was the stimulus that created economic growth and pulled the economy bank from the brink, Karen Hughes — and soon, her cohorts — would us believe that the economy had already been rescued before Obama took office.
Of course, reality is complicated here: Bush probably does deserve credit for TARP and Obama should have, in my opinion, pushed a bigger stimulus and done a better job with cramdown-lite. But, given that Bush preceded Obama, it takes a lot of chutzpah to blame Obama for the recession and give Bush credit for any subsequent recovery.
Zam
And yet every day we are told that we have to take these people seriously.
Skepticat
Chutzpah is what the Rs’ stock in trade–brazen lies–is all about.
Lisa K.
That makes sense, considering it was Clinton’s recession, and Bush’s recovery, right?
Karen Hughes is one of the few women I would actually consider using the C word to describe.
eric
Political memories are short. I can recall a time in 2008 when everyone, and i mean everyone, believed that the “surge’ was the sole issue for the election and would be the issue against which Obama was measured in his first term. I would wager political-surge stories have not seen a front page in six months, if not longer. Give it a year and they will be talking about the Reagan recovery.
eric
asiangrrlMN
@Zam: And, this will be the new talking point as Benen mused over at WaMo. And there will be little-to-no pushback. Rinse, lather, and repeat.
Angela
Chutzpah? These are the same people who state with a straight face that there were no terrorist attacks on US soil during Bush’s presidency. As if 9/11 were a mulligan. What I simply cannot believe is how public perception sways the way these people manipulate it. How can people believe the myths that Republican sources propagate?
cleek
without chutzpah, you don’t become a professional partisan. the truth can only help your cause so much. after that, you have to give the truth a little nudge.
The Republic of Stupidity
Either that or the morals of a rabid weasel in heat…
New Yorker
Damn, Angela beat me to it. If 9/11 occurred on Obama or Clinton’s watch, then certainly this recovery is thanks to Bush.
Redshirt
It’s not Chutzpah, it’s Newspeak. I had to sit through this painful commercial in a lobby this weekend with a Republican lecturing me about budgets and deficits and all that, and I wanted to scream: Its you bastards that broke us!
Good trick if you can work it: Tell everyone you’re a “fiscal conservative”, but do nothing of the sort, and as long as you cut rich people’s taxes, no one will ever doubt you, even if the facts prove you to be 100% wrong.
Also a good trick: Break something, don’t fix it, and then when the other guy’s trying to fix it, attack him for it being broke relentlessly.
We’re doomed – which I suspect is the response the RNC is looking for.
Zam
@asiangrrlMN: Well that is what you get when one of the parties strategy is to simply accuse the media of being liberal every time they call out their stupidity. I swear after the Republican convention and all the swipes taken there the media just laid down and stopped even trying to lift its head.
freelancer
The wingnut’s logical headspace is like a diarrhea-smeared Escher staircase.
ETA – How’s that for a metaphor? Can I have my own Times column now? or do I have to be more of a retarded scold, say, comparing the precariousness of tomorrow’s election to up and coming pop star Ke$ha and her unpredictable trajectory?
Zam
I love this, I think I might have to incorporate this policy into everyday life. It obviously works.
Zifnab
@eric:
Or the Carter relapse, if we see a double-dip.
arguingwithsignposts
Meh, that was nothing but a huge giveaway to the banksters. “credit” isn’t the term I’d use for Hank Paulson’s $700 billion shenanigan.
asiangrrlMN
@Zam: Yeah. The Republicans beat down the media like a bully does, and the media gave up and gave in–especially as they are bent towards the status quo, anyway.
So, unemployment rates are slowly decreasing. Which Republican prez is gonna get the credit for that?
The Republic of Stupidity
@freelancer:
Up the down staircase?
Errrrrrr….
Down the up staircase?
Upstairs/downstairs?
Can I choose Door #2?
How about a different game show?
J.W. Hamner
I’m pretty sure CATO peeps are working around the clock on a way to jigger the numbers to blame the stimulus for the sluggish recovery. Not that it was too small, but that it was done at all. Conservative economists were arguing that it would be counterproductive initially, so I’m actually a little surprised we haven’t see it happen yet.
SteveinSC
@Redshirt:
Well, if Brown wins in Massachusetts, this all will be moot. The Obama Administration will end on Tuesday. The agony will last 3 more years. It seems to me that in the situation we are in, the only back-up plan will be the nuclear option. Worrying about what the Republicans would do if they take over can’t be any worse than the events of Bush II’s reign.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
No, if there is a palpable recovery as felt by the voters before November, regardless of what Karen Hughes says, it will work in favor of the fortunes of the Obama administration.
If there is not a recovery, the effect will be unfavorable to the Obama administration.
Karen Huges’ blatherings will have nothing to do with it. Karen Hughes barks at things, she is not the things themselves.
The most important phrase in an election year is, Are you better off than you were on the last election day?
Yes? Re-elect the guys who won last time. No? Throw them out.
danimal
If it’s good news, it’s due to the tireless heroics of the GOP. If it’s bad news, it’s due to the nefarious plottings of the Democrats and their
adulterous, slickforeign-born, soshalist president.That’s not too hard, now is it.
Zam
President Palin of course, if she wouldn’t have quit her job and gone rogue we would all be reliving the 30’s.
balki
I think the real question is: when the double dip hits, who gets “credit” for that? You guys all seem pretty optimistic that the economy is recovering considering we haven’t seen any net new jobs in the last decade (and we’re still losing them). You know, the whole jobless recovery thing. I’m just saying that if you’re trying to frame this so that Obama gets credit for the recovery, it means he’s responsible now, and he can’t blame the inherited recession any more.
Chat Noir
@Redshirt:
This is what makes me crazy. They broke it, the Democrats are trying to fix it, the Republicans are obstructing to keep the Democrats from fixing, and then the Republicans say, “See? Democrats can’t do anything right! Elect us!” And the stupid electorate is swayed.
Is this why the MA-Senate contest looks to be trending to the teabagger guy Brown? I mean, what gives? Even if Democrats are demoralized, that’s no reason to stay away from the polls.
Sentient Puddle
As for why they broke the economy in the first place, well, that was Clinton’s fault. Bush just didn’t feel like getting around to fixing it until his last six months in office.
DougJ
Well, I think TARP worked and by all accounts, the government won’t lose much money on it.
There were all kinds of problems with it, but I think it may have averted an unspeakable economic disaster.
The Republic of Stupidity
@asiangrrlMN:
It’d be nice if the Republicans would share the cred for a change…
Mebbe show a little loving for Taft… or Hoover…
Davis X. Machina
The GOP wouldn’t survive their first high school debate, though.
You might catch the odd freshman negative team running a counter-plan and attacking significance at the same time, but even novice affirmatives — 9th graders — can figure out that a negative case based on ‘There is no problem, and we solve it better‘ doesn’t hold water, and will savage it in first affirmative rebuttal.
valdivia
Dionne has a piece related to this point in today’s Kaplan edition. I think this year the message of Reps=guys who broke it and are preventing us from fixing it has to be pushed relentlessly. Unfortunately you have guys like Bayh (see NYT article this weekend) saying Obama should not have enacted or moved on HCR. I see this is the meme hardening in the Village, see Klein in Newsweek linked also by Sulli on this.
These idiots seem to not see that when the joblessness rate decreases the poll numbers will increase too. But no, its not the economy or jobs its * overreach*. Idiots.
Balconesfault
@Zam:
It helps if your policies are intended to always make sure the people who own the media have more pocket change and that their lower tier employees (the ones who man cameras or erect sets or pour ink) have no economic leverage.
DougJ
Yes? Re-elect the guys who won last time. No? Throw them out.
Yes, I agree.
Thinking more and more, I do wonder if this Republican talking point makes any difference at all in the short term.
I do think we should worry about the fact that ten years from now, Texas high-school textbooks will make Bush the hero of the Obama recession.
The Republic of Stupidity
@balki:
Trying to frame it?
Hmmmm… I think we’ve got a live one here…
Balconesfault
@Chat Noir:
They also call Obama “the most radical President we’ve ever had”.
I keep asking “radical? seriously?” and they go back to calling things sooozialism that really aren’t.
Zifnab
@Angela:
Republicans know how to play the local stage and the national stage. At the national level, they’re all one amorphous bunch. At the local level, guys like Brown in MA have managed to convince independents that he’s nothing like – say – Sessions in AL or Cornyn in TX. So your local Republican is always a good guy, even when the rest of the party is a pack of jackasses.
As for how the general public gets swayed? Turn on a TV. It’s not difficult to see the barrage of news media and punditry hounding the Democrats for the recession while lauding Republicans for their fiscal moderation. We get this every campaign cycle. The Wurlitzer is just warming up for 2010.
blackwaterdog
Makes sense. If 9/11 happened under Clinton, then obviously it was Bush who saved the economy.
jwb
The argument will be that the stimulus delayed the recovery that TARP would have made happen sooner. Actually, my bet is that they won’t say anything about TARP at all and simply argue that the stimulus delayed the recovery. And of course once real signs of recovery appear we’ll have to have a tax cut.
Napoleon
@DougJ:
I don’t think it does and as stupid as the public can be sometimes I think you have to give them credit for being able to see through the bs more often then they are sometimes given credit for. For all the Republican screaming recent polls show that more people think that the recession is not Obama’s fault then think that it is, and most people think he is handling terrorism just fine even though from listening to the Republican’s over Christmas you would think that Obama was totally inept on the subject.
Zam
This has always gotten me riled up. There is absolutely no evidence for this, yet no one questions it. It’s probably tied in with those bogus “most liberal senator evah!” things that come out every election. Just because he is making a few changes doesn’t mean he is “radical” FDR and Johnson were sure as hell a lot more radical than Obama. Fuck Reagan was, his policies were drastically different from the previous 50 years. Instead we just assign the word radical to be like Bill Ayers, and it has become some stupid buzz word used by republicans to get their base into a froth.
Andy
These are the same people who, a year or so ago, were insisting that FDR made the Great Depression worse.
bayville
Gotta love the CW that the economy is going to rebound in a matter of weeks, if not days.
Based on the daily financial reports, this theory is totally divorced from reality. As the economic news gets gloomier and gloomier, we might be waiting a long, long time to see who gets credit for the recovery.
From Bloomberg:
Sure sounds like the recovery is right around the corner, eh?
balki
@The Republic of Stupidity:
I’m a “live one”? What does that mean? All I’m saying is that if you’re willing to give Obama credit now for any sort of recovery, then you’re implying that he’s now in control of the economy. But if we have a double-dip recession, you’ll surely say that it’s a continuation from the Bush policies. It almost mirrors the situation on Wall Street: Obama has the upside, and Bush has the downside.
So that’s what makes me a live one? I haven’t said anything negative about Obama or positive about Bush. I’m just saying you need to be consistent. Under no circumstance would I give Bush any credit for a recovery. The economy is not yet improving. I’m merely suggesting you wait until we see some job growth (as opposed to reduced numbers of job losses) before claiming that Obama has saved the economy. It will come back to bite you in the ass if we continue to slide.
gnomedad
@Balconesfault:
Soshulism is the absence of Republican domination of all branches of government.
Chad N Freude
@cleek:
right off the edge of the cliff.
scav
Silly people. The arrow of time and logic has a liberal bias.
Zifnab
@Zam:
He’s a radical to the Republicans. But then everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman is a radical to the Republicans. I mean, they spent half the election trying to tie him to Muslim terrorists in Indonesia and Communists from Kenya. They’re obviously working from a skewed perspective.
That said, we get plenty of “He’s just like Bush!” from the moderates and the lefties (and the occasional Bush-was-a-liberal winger).
He’s taking big policy steps away from Bush’s social and foreign policy agenda. He’s slowly (perhaps too slowly) stepping us back from the brink of the economic cliff we were on in 2008.
Talking about a transaction tax on banks is something that hasn’t been seriously done in 30 years. That’s pretty radical. Pushing for gay rights in a nation that is progressively warming to the idea? Not nearly as much. And his positions on Afghanistan and Iraq are almost reactionary, given how far behind the times they’ve become.
Brachiator
Standard operating procedure for the GOP. Republicans are responsible for everything that is good. The Democrats are responsible for nothing good and everything bad.
Jesus preached the importance of free market capitalism in the Sermon on the Mount.
And Obama is a sozul ist.
Besides, can’t Sarah Palin see the recovery from her house?
Chad N Freude
@Davis X. Machina: You are assuming that there is a Democratic debating team. There is a valedictorian, but I don’t see any ninth graders teaming up to discredit the other side’s arguments.
jwb
@Zifnab: It’s the projection thing again. It’s the Goopers who are the actual radicals, so they accuse Obama of being radical so as to divert attention from their own situation. What’s remarkable is the extent to which they get away with it.
Chad N Freude
@balki:
How come we do and they don’t?
Chad N Freude
@scav:
Did you get that from Brick Oven Bill?
Chad N Freude
@Brachiator:
She’s recovering quite nicely at the Fox Newspital. Thank you for your good wishes.
gwangung
Because it’s not very nuanced; it’s binary thought.
Yes, you can be in control, but being able to apply the brakes so you’re only going 60 miles an hour down an icy street doesn’t mean you can be blamed for getting up to 120 mph in the first place.
balki
@Chad N Freude:
Well, they do. But “they” don’t control Congress and the presidency any more. We do. Just because they did/do it doesn’t mean we should.
flukebucket
I only hope Bush was so good that Obama gets two terms.
Bender
You realize that you are now indignantly arguing against… the imagination of Steve Benen, right?
You are now officially Ted Rall Lite, displaying outrage at what Republicans would be like if they were as bad as Benin imagines them being. It says way more about you than “them.”
This post just reeks of exasperation at the failure of The Zero.
balki
@gwangung:
Correct. It’s being treated as binary. People here seem to want to give him credit now for a recovery. I agree fully with your metaphor, only I would argue that we’re not going 60, we’re still going 120. Maybe he’s trying to apply the brakes (although I would argue that he’s only increased speed, as we’ve significantly increased moral hazard, made TBTF institutions much bigger, and have instituted literally zero checks on the banks), but the car hasn’t stopped yet. It’s still heading toward disaster. It’s a bit premature to congratulate the new driver for tapping the brakes when we might still be doomed.
Brachiator
@Chad N Freude:
RE: can’t Sarah Palin see the recovery from her house
Which is right adjacent to Fox Lickspittle.
cleek
@Bender:
ah, the old “liberals worship Obama” strawman. nothing says “wingnut troll” like that one.
Jerry 101
This is clearly false. Clinton caused the recession. Obama failed to fix it. Bush saved us all.
Just like FDR caused the Great Depression and Hoover enacted the laws that led to the great Nixon boom.
Zach
Obama deserves at least as much credit/blame for TARP. His support was essential to getting the act passed in the first place; he ignored McCain’s idiotic grandstanding on the issue and more or less ran the show w/ Dodd during congressional negotiations. It was already very unpopular by the time of the vote to release the 2nd half of the money in January and Obama had more of a hand in that than Bush. Obama was then responsible for shifting TARP from its initial unaccountable/emergency form to a program that will nearly pay for itself, dealing with demands for executive compensation caps, handling the auto bailouts, etc.
Everyone seems to agree that Paulson & Bernanke did a good job after an initial fuckup, so Bush gets credit for picking good people. I don’t recall much personal involvement aside from a primetime address apparently explaining the subprime collapse to a nation of kindergarten students. Obviously this logic applies to Obama, too, but his administration spent a lot of political capital on an unpopular but necessary program.
Brachiator
@balki:
I wouldn’t say that at all. I agree that Obama is now responsible for the economy. Maybe the only thing he could do is not make things worse (which the Republicans did with their anti-regulation mania). The whole “credit” thing” is a bit of BS.
Other stuff that the president does, including the stimulus dance, has indirect effects.
Rock
It’s a credit to Bush’s robust economic policies of low taxation that the economy is recovering even as Obama relentlessly tries to undermine it with his discredited tax and spend philosophy. If Bush’s attempts at privatization and spending cuts hadn’t been thwarted by the Democrat Congress we would be seeing stronger job growth.
We need to return to the conservative economic principles that created the 90s and Bush economic booms: cut taxes and slash spending on social welfare handouts. We need to cut income, capital gains, and corporate tax rates and tighten the belt on unfunded social spending like medicaid and medicare. And we should rescue social security by moving it to higher return investments. Also we need to increase military spending to keep the country safe.
And just to show how effective tripe like that is, my parents (who voted for Obama) have started believing something pretty close to this (they still think Bush was an idiopt, so replace the word “Bush” with “conservative” and they buy in).
I think the biggest disappointment of Obama’s first year is that the Republican governing principles are resurgent rather than discredited. Apparently it will take a true depression for that. Perhaps Obama was elected too soon…
Chad N Freude
@Rock: Whew! Dude, you had me there with the first two paragraphs. I wish it was satire.
El Tiburon
If they can alter history so that 9-11 did not occur under Bush, then this is mere child’s play.
zoe kentucky in pittsburgh
@Rock
Hmmm, Rock +9?
That is some extra strength kool-aid you’re drinking there. For your sake I hope you’re a paid member of the republican party.