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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / “Why Has He Fallen Short?”

“Why Has He Fallen Short?”

by Anne Laurie|  August 7, 20108:44 am| 110 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Democratic Stupidity

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Given the local fondness for Paul Krugman, I found this passage from Frank Rich’s review of Jonathan Alter’s The Promise for the NY Review of Books particularly interesting:

… The Promise depicts a carelessness and dysfunctionality in the economic team that at times matches that revealed by Rolling Stone in the military and civilian leadership of the team managing the Afghanistan war. Geithner’s inexplicable serial income tax delinquencies, as elucidated by Alter, should have disqualified him for Treasury secretary just as Stanley McChrystal’s role in the Pentagon’s political coverup of Pat Tillman’s friendly fire death should have barred him from the top military job in Afghanistan. Summers’s Machiavellian efforts to minimize or outright exclude the input of ostensible administration economic players like Paul Volcker, Austan Goolsbee, and Christina Romer seem to have engaged his energies as much as the policy issues at hand.
__
In April 2009, at Obama’s insistence, a group of economists that Summers had blocked from the Oval Office, including Volcker, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Alan Blinder, was invited to a White House dinner. That colloquy has been cited ever since by White House aides in response to complaints that the administration’s economic circle is too insular. The dinner was a one-off, however, and the liberal economists’ ideas about tougher financial reform and a more ambitious stimulus package have languished.
__
Obama may have entered the White House with the intention of assembling a Lincolnesque “team of rivals,” but Summers subverted that notion by making himself chief packager and gatekeeper for any dissenting arguments about economic policy—all, he claimed, to spare the President from meeting with “long-winded people.” Lincoln’s “team of rivals” reported directly to Lincoln, but, as one source told Alter, Summers so skewed the process in this White House that it was like “a team of rivals reporting to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s prideful secretary of war.” Even Warren Buffett, a supporter who had spoken to Obama weekly during the fall of 2008, “found himself mysteriously out of touch with the new president” once he took office.
__
Obama was now imprisoned within the cozy Summers-Geithner group “and it would be increasingly difficult for him to see beyond its borders.” This “disconnection from the world,” Alter concludes, was not due to ideology or the clout of special interests but was instead “the malign consequence of the American love of expertise, which, with the help of citadels of the meritocracy, had moved from a mere culture to something approaching a cult.” For all Obama’s skepticism of cant, he was “in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a ‘right answer’ to everything. But a right answer for whom?”

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Reader Interactions

110Comments

  1. 1.

    Betty

    August 7, 2010 at 8:59 am

    That sounds like a good analysis. I wasn’t sure Jonathan Alter had it in him. Now the big question. Will it make any difference?

  2. 2.

    BR

    August 7, 2010 at 9:08 am

    Yeah, this has saddened me.

    I feel like Obama wanted to be technocrat, but got convinced by Summers and Geithner that economics is a science and that with the right economic answers he’d have the answers for other areas like energy or health care.

    In my ideal Obama-as-technocrat world, he’d realize that economics buys him nothing and instead give Steven Chu a $1 trillion budget and Ray LaHood a $1 trillion budget and Kathleen Sebelius a $1 trillion budget and say ‘go make shit work’.

  3. 3.

    OhSuzanna

    August 7, 2010 at 9:09 am

    Both insightful and depressing. It’s only 9 in the morning and I want a drink.
    I also think the White House needs a new Press Secretary.

  4. 4.

    wilfred

    August 7, 2010 at 9:12 am

    This “disconnection from the world,” Alter concludes, was not due to ideology or the clout of special interests but was instead “the malign consequence of the American love of expertise, which, with the help of citadels of the meritocracy, had moved from a mere culture to something approaching a cult.”

    But wouldn’t still have been ‘the American love of expertise’ that would have opened the door to more experts?

    I disagree with Alter’s conclusion above since he’s just moaning the fact that presumably the ‘right’ experts were not listened to.

    Seems to me the problem was, is, and will continue to be politics, and the inability or simple unwillingness to really consider what the national interest might actually be.

  5. 5.

    cat48

    August 7, 2010 at 9:23 am

    The stimulus would not have been any bigger. I don’t care who he had hired. It still had to get thru the Senate. THE SENATE or Obama himself decided how big it would be, less than a trillion! The economy is faltering now because the stimulus is running out. Maybe he thought he could get more later.

    The constant wanking about the economic team is not productive. Rich constantly says the economic team are Goldman Sachs alumni which is a BLATANT LIE. He has said that in 3 NYT columns. His Sunday column is simply a weekly hit job on the admin.

    Nothing disgusts me more than “Where did he go wrong” columns by progressive trolls. They are a vehicle to criticize and attack. Not productive at this point……..

  6. 6.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 9:24 am

    I think this is an “If Only the Czar Knew” defense.

    For better or worse, Obama has adopted this economic policy. He hired these folks.

    And I do not think he was somehow denied information he wanted or needed.

  7. 7.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 9:25 am

    @cat48:

    What would be productive in your estimation?

  8. 8.

    geg6

    August 7, 2010 at 9:30 am

    Why anyone would listen to Tim Geithner and Larry Summers over Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jamie Galbreath, or Paul Volcker is beyond me. Especially a smart Dem like Obama. In this case, I fear, the Firebaggers may have a partial point in that I think that Rahm has had a lot of influence in these matters. Now, that doesn’t at all excuse Obama’s choice to agree. On the contrary, it is one of his biggest failures, along with his approach to secrecy, intelligence, and civil liberty in the GWOT, which are not very demonstrably different than his predecessor. And this from someone who will still campaign and vote for him.

  9. 9.

    cat48

    August 7, 2010 at 9:38 am

    What would be productive in your estimation?

    I hear the NAACP and a few other groups are planning a jobs march on DC. Angry crowds on Capitol Hill is productive because the Congress is too scared to authorize more stimulus because of midterms and the deficit.

    I don’t see how mean blog posts and oped columns accomplish anything w/the economy and that is what needs to be fixed.

  10. 10.

    wilfred

    August 7, 2010 at 9:41 am

    Re: peremptory disqualification of Geithner, McChrysral, et al.: What about this?:

    “She has, supposedly, all this vast foreign policy experience,” he (Obama) said. “I have to say that when it came to making the most important foreign policy decision of our generation, the decision to invade Iraq, Senator Clinton got it wrong.”

    So he made her Secretary of State.

    Personal connections and party politics have negated the sense of what might actually be good for the country. That’s the problem.

  11. 11.

    valdivia

    August 7, 2010 at 9:41 am

    @cat48:

    this. exactly.

    ETA: @cat48:
    and this too. why not a campaign to target the idiotic 2 or 3 dem senators who keep putting their foot on the jobs agenda? I am looking at you Nelson.

  12. 12.

    jwb

    August 7, 2010 at 9:44 am

    Summers as Obama’s Cheney? And Romer’s leaving doesn’t really help matters.

  13. 13.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 9:45 am

    @cat48:

    So you think writing (you are critical of Rich as well, not just blogs) about a subject has no effect?

    I imagine the NAACP disagrees with you.

  14. 14.

    Toast

    August 7, 2010 at 9:47 am

    The “American love of expertise”? Where is this “America” the writer speaks of? I wish to move there.

  15. 15.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 9:50 am

    @wilfred:

    And he made Biden VP. This seems a strange line of attack.

    I think it was perfectly appropriate for Obama to use the fact that he was right on Iraq to demonstrate why he was the superior candidate for President.

    But I also think he was right not to disqualify people from high office because they were wrong.

    This goes to the issue of the fact that the paths chosen (of course subject to what he could get from Congress) was subject to Obama’s judgment.

    There is room to argue the points, but personally, I am less critical of his personnel choices and more critical of the policy the Obama Administration chose to champion on the stimulus. Yes, he should have aimed for a bigger stimulus.

  16. 16.

    Napoleon

    August 7, 2010 at 9:51 am

    @geg6:

    Why anyone would listen to Tim Geithner and Larry Summers over Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jamie Galbreath, or Paul Volcker is beyond me.

    Bingo – His problem is he picked people who had been proven wrong time and time again presumably because they had cred with the Washington elites (whom themselves have gotten things wrong time and time again).

  17. 17.

    Gina

    August 7, 2010 at 9:52 am

    @Toast: I’m not sure about that one either, more like “love of Ivy League/Wall Street club members”.

  18. 18.

    Allison W.

    August 7, 2010 at 9:55 am

    @wilfred:

    Yes. I don’t get it either. The article seems to say that Obama relies on experts too much, but what the heck is Krugman and the others that the Left keeps hollering about?

    What also confuses me is that summers and geithner haven’t said anything that krugman would disagree with. At least not since they took office.

    BR:

    In my ideal Obama-as-technocrat world, he’d realize that economics buys him nothing and instead give Steven Chu a $1 trillion budget and Ray LaHood a $1 trillion budget and Kathleen Sebelius a $1 trillion budget and say ‘go make shit work’.

    I didn’t realize Obama had the power to dole out 3 trillion dollars just like that.

  19. 19.

    cat48

    August 7, 2010 at 9:56 am

    @BTD:

    I’ll ask the NAACP as I am in regular contact with them at political meetings and doing political field work for the midterms. I’m registering voters today.

    The writing doesn’t bother me as much as the lack of any activity directed at Congress. It should have started months ago to be effective.

    Rich is who he is. It does really bother me that he continually states AS A FACT that the economic team is from Goldman Sachs which is a LIE. I simply would like to know why he does this. I email him every time & he has never replied.

  20. 20.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 9:57 am

    @Allison W.:

    Summers and Geithner apparently advised the President in ways that Krugman would not have (indeed did not, given that anyone could read Krugman’s advice in the NYTimes.)

  21. 21.

    Allison W.

    August 7, 2010 at 9:59 am

    I’d also like to add that its one thing to say another team would advise the president differently, but its a whole different ball game when this other team has to take their game plan to congress.

  22. 22.

    Michael

    August 7, 2010 at 9:59 am

    OT, but it is really important that corporate executives get lots and lots more money than the rest of us because they’re brilliant, full of sound judgment, sober and reflective about their actions.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/06/AR2010080605138.html?wprss=rss_print

    Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, announced late Friday that star chief executive Mark Hurd had resigned after an investigation into claims of sexual harassment against him turned up evidence of other misconduct.
    …
    Hurd has been credited with reviving one of the nation’s most storied tech firms, but he was forced to step down after a former HP contractor came forward with charges several weeks ago that he had sexually harassed her while working on the company’s marketing activities. The board launched an investigation and found that Hurd had a personal relationship with the contractor that he had not disclosed. Hurd also filed several inaccurate expense reports meant to conceal his relationship, the board found.

    The stresses of dealing with the Obama regime’s tyrannical oppression of white businessmen forced him to do it. And fear of Communist Marxist Socialist Muslim investigations into Hurd’s actions led to a panicky and unjustified action by the HP board.

    /glibertarian fluffer mode

  23. 23.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 10:01 am

    @cat48:

    I don’t know. Not a big fan of Rich myself.

    I applaud your efforts.

    It’s a tough place for someone like me who has a lot of criticism for Dems, including Obama, but who knows just how awful the GOP is (which is what gets me spitting mad at Ezra Klein’s championing of Paul Ryan, thank Gawd Krugman went after him – it really needed to be done.)

    I know that in my own actions and writings, I am pretty much putting aside my disappointment with the Dems and focusing on just how bad the GOP is.

    It’s not an easy transition.

  24. 24.

    Svensker

    August 7, 2010 at 10:02 am

    @BTD:

    But I also think he was right not to disqualify people from high office because they were wrong.
    This goes to the issue of the fact that the paths chosen (of course subject to what he could get from Congress) was subject to Obama’s judgment.

    Could you say that again, in English?

    Sorry, that was rude. If what you said WAS in English, could you say it again in such a way as this caffeine-challenged person could understand.

  25. 25.

    Allison W.

    August 7, 2010 at 10:03 am

    @BTD:

    in what way? more stimulus? everyone was saying that. No need to hire Krugman to hear that. Like I said in my other post, its one thing to advise, but what’s really important is if it can pass through congress. Krugman and the others will have to deal with congress. why do so many people gloss over that?

    basically what I’m saying is that I am more impressed with the person that can get an effective plan through THIS congress. I have yet to hear anyone provide great advice on how to get the best out of THIS congress.

  26. 26.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 10:03 am

    @Napoleon:

    Summers, Rubin and Bill Clinton were clearly wrong on the deregulation of derivatives (Brooksley Born has the distinction of being the Cassandra).

    But in 1993, Clinton and Rubin were right on how to manage the economy.

    Obviously they were right some of the time. At least I think so.

  27. 27.

    wilfred

    August 7, 2010 at 10:06 am

    @BTD:

    My point is that the article questions the appointments of Geithner and McCrystal for what are essentially questions of ethics. A true pragmatist/realist wouldn’t be overly concerned with that if the candidate for the job demonstrated outstanding competence and expertise for the job in question. Think Bill Clinton/blowjobs, or making trains run on time.

    Thus Sen. Clinton’s appointment. Candidate Obama derided her competence, not her ethics. So why no question of how she got her job?

    Alter is guilty of a kind of (esoteric) over-determination that masks the real determinant – politics.

  28. 28.

    Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle

    August 7, 2010 at 10:07 am

    @cat48: Did Rich specifically say Goldman Sachs, or just too intertwined too Wall Street? Because I bet it would be the second. Why? Because Rich has to know that Summers worked for a different Wall Street outfit. Also, I have to think that Rich would know the difference between Obama’s economic team and the Treasury Department(where all the Goldman people are).

  29. 29.

    Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle

    August 7, 2010 at 10:09 am

    @wilfred: So if Geithner was okay, why did Tom Daschle get thrown under the bus(and wasn’t someone else thrown under the bus for tax problems as well)?

  30. 30.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 10:10 am

    @Allison W.:

    We wrote about it a lot at the time, and you do not get to test the path not taken, but the one way most of us suggested was to start the negotiations with the “moderates” at a higher number. There was no rational basis for the number the moderates chose. They just wanted iot to be less than what the House and the White House had chosen.

    Thus, under our theory, if the House and the White House had started at say, 1.5 trillion, the negotiations would probably have gotten us to 990 billion – 280 billion more than was actually passed (remember the “$787 billion stimulus” included the 80 billion annual AMT fix, which was not stimulus, or really stimulative, at all.)

    In addition, the package should not have included any tax cuts, let the “moderates” add the tax cuts, which are very ineffective stimulus.

    In essence though, it seems the Obama Administration largely got the package it wanted. I went back and read about yesterday after reading Josh Marshall bemoan the size of the stimulus. But in February 2009, TPM was favorably quoting people saying this:

    A Win is a Win – Like everyone else, I’m waiting for the details. But from what I’ve heard so far, this seems to be a remarkable triumph for the new president. A month ago, Obama economists Romer and Bernstein released job-creation projections that “assumed a package just slightly over the $775 billion currently under discussion.” Lo and behold, the final bill comes in at $789 billion. It reportedly includes Obama’s proposed tax cuts, comprising almost exactly the same proportion of the overall package. For the past month, media attention has focused on all the changes to the package, and on the controversies it has engendered. Obama has been criticized for failing to forge a bipartisan consensus, for not safeguarding his priorities, and for not taking a sufficiently aggressive role in the negotiations on the Hill. So it’s worth stepping back to take note of the fact that the final package looks remarkably like what Obama has wanted all along. In fact, it’s closer to that original proposal than to either the House or Senate versions of the bill. Remarkable.

    That also conformed with the reporting at the time – to wit, the Obama Administration largely got the stimulus it wanted.

  31. 31.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 10:11 am

    @wilfred:

    Completely agree with your last line. I also am not a fan of Alter. His narratives always fit too neatly. Of course we are all guilty of that, but he wrote a book, not a blog post.

  32. 32.

    Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle

    August 7, 2010 at 10:11 am

    @BTD: Rubin was right in retrospect? Really? Sure, short term maybe but it hasn’t helped us long term.

  33. 33.

    mai naem

    August 7, 2010 at 10:12 am

    They may not all be from GS but a good bunch of them are and Geithner might as well be because of what he did at the NY Fed for AIG which he knew was going to help out GS bigtime. BTW, I wouldn’t be surprised if Geithner ends up at GS once he’s done at Treasury. Furthermore, Obama let Kashnkari stay on at TARP for something like a year after he got into office and he was a GS alum.

  34. 34.

    wilfred

    August 7, 2010 at 10:13 am

    @Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:

    Politics, I should think. Again, if it’s not simply ethics – it isn’t – and it’s not simply competence – it isn’t – then it must have an awful lot to do with political considerations.

    Politics these days is about looking around the negotiating table and knowing where the real money sits.

    Pragmatism is deferring to it.

  35. 35.

    Michael

    August 7, 2010 at 10:13 am

    OT, but it is really important that corporate executives get lots and lots more money than the rest of us because they’re brilliant, full of sound judgment, sober and reflective about their actions.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/06/AR2010080605138.html?wprss=rss_print

    Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, announced late Friday that star chief executive Mark Hurd had resigned after an investigation into claims of sexual harassment against him turned up evidence of other misconduct.
    …
    Hurd has been credited with reviving one of the nation’s most storied tech firms, but he was forced to step down after a former HP contractor came forward with charges several weeks ago that he had sexually harassed her while working on the company’s marketing activities. The board launched an investigation and found that Hurd had a personal relationship with the contractor that he had not disclosed. Hurd also filed several inaccurate expense reports meant to conceal his relationship, the board found.

    The stresses of dealing with the Obama regime’s tyrannical oppression of white businessmen forced him to do it. And fear of Communist Marxist Soc!alist Muslim investigations into Hurd’s actions led to a panicky and unjustified action by the HP board.

    /glibertarian fluffer mode

  36. 36.

    Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle

    August 7, 2010 at 10:13 am

    @BTD: Doesn’t Alter have(or at least had) access?

  37. 37.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 10:14 am

    @Svensker:

    I read it again, and not sure which part is baffling.

    Shorter – the path the Obama Administration chose was decided by the President, not by Summers or Rahm Emanuel.

    The first part – being wrong in one (or even more) instances should not be automatically disqualifying.

  38. 38.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 10:15 am

    @Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:

    A double edged sword. Bob Woodward had access to the Bush Administration and his books were shit, largely because of it.

    Hard to write history contemporaneously with the event.

  39. 39.

    General Stuck

    August 7, 2010 at 10:15 am

    I think Obama picked those experts complicit in creating the mess to at least fix, or stabilize what they helped mis-create because of an over riding fear of introducing too much change too fast and causing the economy to go over a cliff in it’s moribund state when he took office.

    And not getting stuck with the legacy of the first black presnit to kill the economy completely dead. If he gets elected a second term and if our structurally impaired economy that was 30 years being fucked up by winger ideology recovers to a certain point, then I hope and expect him to change course to more strident reform, though that is always dependent on the morans in congress doing the right thing, which isn’t their strong suit.

  40. 40.

    cat48

    August 7, 2010 at 10:16 am

    @BTD:

    I think Dems having power is really hard because the party is so diverse that some group or groups is always upset about something that is going on or needs to be done. I don’t hold Obama blameless, but he is attacked so often by friendly fire plus repugs; I tend to not indulge in it too often.

    I hate to say it, but I admire the way the repugs hang together & push their agenda through. Dems just spend way too much time being upset. I’m a long time Dem and when we have power, we tend to waste it arguing amongst ourselves That is my one lifetime regret about being a Dem.

  41. 41.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 10:18 am

    @Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:

    The 1993 economic policies helped us short and long term. Imagine the pickle we would be in ifnot for the growth experienced in the 90s and the higher tax revenues collected then.

    And today, imagine if the Dems could not point to the growth in the 90s in order to argue for the end of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy?

    No, Rubin was right in 1993. And it is benefitting us today IMO.

  42. 42.

    PeakVT

    August 7, 2010 at 10:19 am

    Ezra’s take on Ryan was wrong, but I think he gets it right on Summers.

  43. 43.

    Allison W.

    August 7, 2010 at 10:21 am

    @BTD:

    Do you think $290 billion more would have made a difference? I don’t. Not from what I’ve been reading. I agree on the tax cuts, but my opinion is that we would have had to have made the bill smaller to bring on more votes. It’s incredibly difficult to negotiate with people who are perfectly willing to do nothing. Nothing to gain/lose from passing a bigger stimulus and nothing to gain/lose if they don’t pass a stimulus at all.

    sorry if I don’t address your entire post, I’m about to leave the house.

  44. 44.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 10:21 am

    @cat48:

    I do not think the GOP model of governing is effective at all. When the modern GOP has power, disaster is what ensues.

    As messy as Dem governing can be, surely you would not want the GOP model which leads to disaster.

    I think the hardest thing for Dems is to understand we can fight amongst ourselves but still understand the grave threat the modern GOP is to the nation – which makes election time a must time for unity – even for, gulp, the likes of Blanche Lincoln. If she had a shot at winning, I would be for the DSCC pouring money into her race. But it would be wasted money now. She is down 30.

  45. 45.

    wilfred

    August 7, 2010 at 10:22 am

    I’m not a fan of Obama but this is silly:

    For all Obama’s skepticism of cant, he was “in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a ‘right answer’ to everything

    Where to begin this, besides the obvious that as President of the United States he’s sort of obligated to at least try to to something like that and make a decision at some point.

    I just finished with two guys who gave me an estimate on some work to be done on my house. Fuck more estimates and analysis.

    After all, who can really say, nay know, what ‘right’ really means. What does ‘knowing’ even mean, really?

    You know?

  46. 46.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 10:22 am

    @Allison W.:

    Would 290 billion dollars help now? Would you oppose a second stimulus of 290 billion dollars?

  47. 47.

    Linda Featheringill

    August 7, 2010 at 10:24 am

    If [and it is a big if] the entire economic system is beginning a world-wide, end-of-the-system’s-life contraction because most people don’t have enough money to buy the things they want or even need,

    then it wouldn’t matter what the Administration economists are yammering on about.

    Unless, of course, they want to talk about what to do next. But nobody who is a big whig and nobody who wants to be a big whig and nobody who hopes to someday hang out with a big whig wants to talk about that.

    So it matters only a little what their individual stories and individual philosophies are.

  48. 48.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 10:24 am

    @PeakVT:

    True but still, on the size of the stimulus, Summers was pretty clearly wrong.

  49. 49.

    cat48

    August 7, 2010 at 10:26 am

    @mai naem:

    Fair enough. Two goldman sachs employees, BUT RICH ALWAYS SAYS THE ENTIRE ECONOMIC TEAM ARE GOLDMAN SACHS ALUMNI, not the tarp guy was GS or the asst. whatever was GS, THE ECONOMIC TEAM, a blatant lie!

  50. 50.

    wilfred

    August 7, 2010 at 10:29 am

    @Linda Featheringill:

    Posterity papers – I confess, he did it.

  51. 51.

    Allison W.

    August 7, 2010 at 10:33 am

    One last thing:

    I don’t buy this story that Summer’s is keeping people/ideas away from Obama. Just like I didn’t buy the story that Cheney was keeping people/ideas away from bush. These two made a choice and Obama chose on his own not to bring on certain people for whatever reasons (I have no idea). Obama reads. And as many of you say Obama is smart so why come to the conclusion that Summers has locked him in a tower somewhere? Obama likes to play the “in the bubble” card sometimes, but he knows, he reads, he has a computer, and he makes his own choices at the end of the day.

    Anyways read this from TNR: partially good news. partially.

    http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/76853/why-you-should-care-about-peter-diamond

  52. 52.

    mr. whipple

    August 7, 2010 at 10:34 am

    Thus, under our theory, if the House and the White House had started at say, 1.5 trillion, the negotiations would probably have gotten us to 990 billion – 280 billion more than was actually passed (remember the “$787 billion stimulus” included the 80 billion annual AMT fix, which was not stimulus, or really stimulative, at all.)

    As was asked at the time, where were the votes in the Senate? As far as the tax cuts go, part of that was an Obama campaign promise and one reason I voted for him.

    Even assuming the people pointing fingers now got a stimulus twice the size, what would the unemployment rate be now? I don’t think it would be a heck of a lot lower, plus the money would still be running out.

    Obama can’t fix a complex problem 30 years in the making in a year and a half. It took FDR from 1932 until the start of WW2(the mother of all stimulus packages) to get unemployment near an acceptable level, so I have difficulty believing a couple hundred billion more would have made a significant difference.

    Things suck and will suck for a long time, unless we can reinflate or invent some new BS bubble to keep things propped up until that crashes, too.

  53. 53.

    cat48

    August 7, 2010 at 10:50 am

    @Allison W.:

    He sounds great, as well as the other 2 pending in the Senate. Those 2 also think jobs are part of their job.

  54. 54.

    BTD

    August 7, 2010 at 11:01 am

    @mr. whipple:

    The question, then and now, misses the point. It is about the starting point of the negotiation and understanding the psyche of the “moderates.” There was no rational thought process by which they arrived at the number they would accept – other than the number being less than the number the House and the WH proposed.

    Thus, the theory goes, they would have accepted 950 billion so long as it was less than what Dems proposed.

    As far as the tax cuts, the ones in the stimulus bill were NOT part of Obama’s platform, and he would have gotten them anyway, but by way of a “concession” to the “moderates.”

    As far as the AMT fix being an Obama campaign promise, well that is just silly. The AMT has been fixed by every President and every Congress every years for 20 years. It was not even an issue.

    Surely that is not one of the reason you voted for Obama. From Dennis Kucinich to Alan Keyes they all would have done that.

  55. 55.

    NobodySpecial

    August 7, 2010 at 11:26 am

    Ok, tough question here.

    If you believe this as being true as far as economic issues (The idea that Obama was hostage to his underlings and their filters), then why the hell can’t the same be true involving domestic policy and Rahmbo? And secondly, if you believe this is true, then how do you define it as being any better than Shrub being the unwitting pawn of Cheney and Rumsfeld when they were feeding him their neocon baloney?

    I don’t believe it.

    I think Obama, like a lot of people, (even the smart ones) has an idea that economics is actually a science and not voodoo on top of folk wisdom.

  56. 56.

    Alex S.

    August 7, 2010 at 11:46 am

    I don’t like Summers, he looks too much like a political weather fane to me. One might also call him adaptive, but… I don’t know, he likes the political fights a bit too much.

  57. 57.

    Elie

    August 7, 2010 at 12:19 pm

    @wilfred:

    “I disagree with Alter’s conclusion above since he’s just moaning the fact that presumably the ‘right’ experts were not listened to.

    Seems to me the problem was, is, and will continue to be politics, and the inability or simple unwillingness to really consider what the national interest might actually be. ”

    My only argument with this part of your statement is that the best politics always must include the national interest.

  58. 58.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 12:23 pm

    @BTD:

    Thus, under our theory, if the House and the White House had started at say, 1.5 trillion, the negotiations would probably have gotten us to 990 billion

    Given all you lay out here, why isn’t your theory that they should have started at, say, $10 trillion?

    Personally, I think the whole debate about where negotiations should have started to be entirely beside the point. Negotiations came out where they did only after a huge effort. How would tougher and/or smarter negotiation push that number higher? How would it make the last few holdouts behave differently?

  59. 59.

    Elie

    August 7, 2010 at 12:24 pm

    @NobodySpecial:

    “I think Obama, like a lot of people, (even the smart ones) has an idea that economics is actually a science and not voodoo on top of folk wisdom. ”

    I am afraid that you may be right, but I don’t think that its easy to discern in this part of his tenure… these things always seem more clear looking back after a time and less so close up.. There has been so much blood in the water about what Obama is doing and how he is doing it wrong that no one can say he has had anything but rigorous questioning of everything from his conceptual base, his intentions, his politics and his soul (added the last thing for the sake of exaggeration). That man is a magnet for controversy like no other President I can remember..

  60. 60.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 12:28 pm

    @BTD:

    As far as the tax cuts, the ones in the stimulus bill were NOT part of Obama’s platform, and he would have gotten them anyway, but by way of a “concession” to the “moderates.”

    Seems to me like some seriously bad “framing” would likely arise from a proposed stimulus bill that was all spending and no tax cuts, with the tactical justification that tax cuts would be added in later; it would play as though naive, by-the-book free-spending liberal Obama got schooled by fiscal conservatives and quickly learned the error of his ways.

  61. 61.

    Keith G

    August 7, 2010 at 12:38 pm

    It seems like every president that I have been conscious of has fallen victim of advisor/aid capture to one degree or another. This includes Jed Barlett.

    Does this say something about the job or about the humans involved?

    I will be interested as history unfolds to see how accurate this account is.

  62. 62.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    August 7, 2010 at 12:43 pm

    @wilfred:

    I’m not a fan of Obama but this is silly:
    For all Obama’s skepticism of cant, he was
    in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis,
    there was a right answer to everything
    Where to begin this, besides the obvious that as President of the United States he’s sort of obligated to at least try to to something like that and make a decision at some point.

    I think what is irking people about the seemingly over-analytic Obama-as-Spock is that (a) with benefit of hindsight it looks like he got the analysis wrong, and (b) the contrast with FDR’s approach of continual experimentation. I

    ‘ve been plowing through my reading re: the New Deal recently and the contrast with Obama’s approach is pretty striking. FDR just sort of kept throwing out ideas and plans and seeing what worked and what didn’t, and the thinness of the underlying analytical data to justify the different plans which people were proposing back then is by contemporary standards pretty shocking, in large part because the amount of sociological data they had in hand back in the early 1930s was really small.

    So FDR just sort of winged it, got a lot of things right, and what he got wrong has gone down the memory hole. Obama in contrast is much more down in the details, and his failures are in the glare of the spotlight while most of the things he’s gotten right so far won’t pay out for another 5-10 years at least.

    And the other thing is that our society and economy which Obama is tasked with trying to fix is more than twice as large by population, more diverse, and much, much more complicated than the America of the 1930s which FDR had to deal with. It is easier to repair a cuckoo clock than a Swiss watch. There are days when I think that the US today is flirting with some sort of inherent scalabilty limit on the size and complexity of workable human societies, and that this country really needs to be broken up into 2 or more semi-autonomous sub-nations, so we can have a more federated power structure and a more loosely coupled political system.

  63. 63.

    Mike M

    August 7, 2010 at 12:56 pm

    I don’t put much stock in these inside the WH analyses. They always seem engineered to fit the writers viewpoint, and are so short on actual facts that I’m hard pressed to give them more weight than Hollywood gossip.

    When Romer resigned I read a piece on TPM that she had been cut off by Summers. Later, I heard a portion of an interview with her on NPR in which she said that she met with the President every day.

    I think it is just wishful thinking that a higher stimulus package could have gotten through the Senate. As it was, it took a herculean effort to get to 60 votes.

    Yes, I think the administration was crossing their fingers that the stimulus package would be enough, knowing full well that both back-of-the-envelope calculations and complete economic models showed that it wouldn’t. Still, politics is the art of the possible.

  64. 64.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 1:16 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    Personally, I think the whole debate about where negotiations should have started to be entirely beside the point. Negotiations came out where they did only after a huge effort. How would tougher and/or smarter negotiation push that number higher? How would it make the last few holdouts behave differently?

    Lolwhut?
    That is the definition of “negotiation”. You discard the number who are recalcitrant and you know for a fact won’t say yes to anything you offer. Then you find out what the others who will play ball want. And you come up with something.
    Since ISTM a large number of possible votes really didn’t care what they got as long as they could be viewed as being “tough on the WH” then negotiations should have allowed for that.
    At this point I think there is no credible argument to made that the WH desired a different outcome than what was passed.

  65. 65.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 1:19 pm

    @Mike M:

    Still, politics is the art of the possible.

    And if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.
    I am sick to freakin death of this stupid and meaningless saying.

  66. 66.

    b-psycho

    August 7, 2010 at 1:41 pm

    Unless the intentionally corrupt structure of the economy itself is scrapped, all the “stimulus” in the world will, in the long run, mean fuck all. Go ahead and debate band-aids over machete wounds though, it’s funny to read sometimes.

  67. 67.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 1:53 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    Then you find out what the others who will play ball want. And you come up with something.

    What they wanted was less spending. Accordingly, they got less spending. That was the negotiation. What leverage was there to get more? Bupkes.

  68. 68.

    o kanis

    August 7, 2010 at 2:02 pm

    A blind cat could see this coming.

    As when Obama, post the Lehman fiasco (September, 2008), stood in front of the cameras and excoriated Wall Street on behalf of Main Street. And standing beside him…none other than Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, looking serious as if they meant business.

    They meant business all right. Wall Street casino business.

    Two of the biggest Wall Street scum in existence. Yeah, nobody saw this coming. You never dared point this out at the time, that the Wall Street fix was in, especially in blogs like this. Mantra: give him a chance.

    And then Geithner…nuff said.

  69. 69.

    Will Danz

    August 7, 2010 at 2:24 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    Agreed. It assumes that there is some clear definition of “possible” which everyone agrees on, written in a clear set of Beltway rules. But what it usually means, in reality: what David Broder believes. Tepid D.C. media “conventional wisdom,” which skews center-right. (Increasingly: just right.)

    This is not to say that it doesn’t come down to realpolitik when you’re in the details, but that “art of the possible” canard is most often used to defend a lack of political courage and / or vision.

  70. 70.

    Will Danz

    August 7, 2010 at 2:24 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    Agreed. It assumes that there is some clear definition of “possible” which everyone agrees on, written in a clear set of Beltway rules. But what it usually means, in reality: what David Broder believes. Tepid D.C. media “conventional wisdom,” which skews center-right. (Increasingly: just right.)

    This is not to say that it doesn’t come down to realpolitik when you’re in the details, but that “art of the possible” canard is most often used to defend a lack of political courage and / or vision.

  71. 71.

    Phoebe

    August 7, 2010 at 2:27 pm

    @wilfred: @Allison W.:

    I don’t think Alter was saying that Obama just picked the wrong experts, and that if he’d picked the right experts it’d all be fine.

    What he needed to do was pick people who disagreed with one another, to get a mixed bag, and THEN the cream might rise to the top, when ideas have to withstand the scrutiny and arguments of the opposing views. That’s something Obama’s always touted as the best process, and it seems he didn’t walk his own talk on that one, is all. And he should have.

  72. 72.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 2:29 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    What they wanted was less spending. Accordingly, they got less spending. That was the negotiation. What leverage was there to get more? Bupkes.

    Bullshit. None of them give a damn about “less spending” if they have pork for cover.
    The leverage is you have a competent team that finds out where they can be bought off, and then buys them off.
    I’m not talking about DeMint, et al.
    There were enough players in play to get whatever you wanted and still provide cover. The bottom line is the end deal is what the WH wanted. There can be no other conclusion.

  73. 73.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 2:33 pm

    @Phoebe:

    What he needed to do was pick people who disagreed with one another, to get a mixed bag,

    And what we see more and more is a self-selecting group of decision makers. The “elite” has become geographically diverse but united in thought and background.
    There are no mixed bag opinions allowed into the circle.

  74. 74.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    August 7, 2010 at 2:33 pm

    At this point, Obama is the most successful leader in the history of democracy mostly due to his supernatural ability to bring people together. Not bad for a socia1ist from Kenya.

  75. 75.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 2:54 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    The leverage is you have a competent team that finds out where they can be bought off, and then buys them off.

    Of course, they “bought off” people in the health care debate and won only louder moans and groans across the political spectrum. It’s almost as though people who want to complain will always find justification for it!

  76. 76.

    wilfred

    August 7, 2010 at 3:04 pm

    @Phoebe:

    Maybe so. Such a technique works for non zero-sum decisions. For example, anybody against any form of stimulus would have been ignored outright. The only question was the amount of money involved.

    In questions of, say, going to war – where there is zero-sum outcome – then I hope he listens to the voices against.

    I think of it like a closed research group, one that stopped seeking out or admitting new members. Summers is an academic – he of all people should know what that results in.

  77. 77.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 3:06 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    It’s almost as though people who want to complain will always find justification for it!

    It’s equally shocking, shocking, that people who want to excuse away any outcome will find justification for it!

  78. 78.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 3:09 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    Of course, they “bought off” people in the health care debate

    And they didn’t fucking buy off people in HCR, they made a deal before negotiations started. They agreed to pre-kill outcomes that weren’t favorable to a whole subset.
    That the decision was necessary can be argued. But it wasn’t part of negotiations. They agreed to it with 3rd parties before ever dealing with Congress.

  79. 79.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 3:11 pm

    @FlipYrWhig: And again, the stimulus is not HCR. Let’s not confuse the two as you are attempting.

  80. 80.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 3:18 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    There can be no other conclusion.

    Thanks, Mr. Greenwald. :P

    IMHO the real reason why the stimulus was constrained as narrowly as it was was because of the continuing aftershocks from TARP and the other bank stuff. That was beaucoup bucks, rushed through because of a hair-on-fire emergency. Economists explained that things were dire and the sky was falling and the whole world economy might collapse in the morning. But it also had the effect of making it virtually impossible to depict anything else as a hair-on-fire emergency.

    My general take is that everyone almost certainly agreed that more stimulus would be better, but they also knew that politically it wasn’t going to be possible to get everything they wanted, and they were definitely impeded by a desire to seem “reasonable.” To me, the way everything played out suggests that they were right, _politically_: they caught a lot of flak anyway and didn’t get everything they wanted.

    But I am not convinced that handling it differently would have resulted in more money or a better arrangement of the existing money. I think $1T was an immense psychological barrier and proposing $1T would have driven the political system completely crazy. So they ended up around $800B. BTD thinks they could have gotten closer to $1T, but he doesn’t appear to feel–as I do–that $1T was unfathomable to _many_ Democrats as well as the few Republicans who eventually could be brought on board. And I also think it’s virtually impossible to say convincingly that “we need $X now and not a penny less,” because someone could readily say, “why not 75% of $X now? See how it goes, and then we’ll see if you can convince us about the other 25%.”

    All of which is to say that I don’t see what is to be gained by saying “those dumbfucks got the stimulus wrong, it was too small to begin with,” rather than “the original stimulus has been working, but we still need more stimulus now.” Which the infamous economic team has in fact been saying. IMHO fussing about how it was such a fuckup actually makes it _less_ likely to get the additional stimulus we still need through the Congress, and makes it harder to cudgel the Republicans for standing in the way of new efforts.

  81. 81.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 3:28 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    All of which is to say that I don’t see what is to be gained by saying “those dumbfucks got the stimulus wrong, it was too small to begin with,” rather than “the original stimulus has been working, but we still need more stimulus now.” Which the infamous economic team has in fact been saying. IMHO fussing about how it was such a fuckup actually makes it less likely to get the additional stimulus we still need through the Congress, and makes it harder to cudgel the Republicans for standing in the way of new efforts.

    This is so wrong it is almost off the charts.
    There was never going to be a second bite at the apple. Either use the formulas that made sense and go for what was needed or lose 30+ seats in the House and 5 in the Senate.
    WE WILL NEVER SEE ANOTHER STIMULUS PASSED WHILE OBAMA IS PRESIDENT.

    And this was so known at the time I would have wagered my fucking house on it.
    Obama and The D’s ONLY CHANCE to stay politically viable (as well as actually helping the states and real people), was to go for what was needed.
    They’re fucking dead now. In 3 months with unemployment at 9%+ and long term unemployment at 40%+ or much higher they are going to get swamped.

  82. 82.

    S Brennan

    August 7, 2010 at 3:34 pm

    Alter was early in selling the Iraq invasion through the use of very clever arguments that confused what Saddam did in the early nineties in response to our attempts to cause his overthrow, with what he was doing in 2002 prior to our invasion. He has very effectively backtracked…to the point that few associate him with that idiocy.

    Alter was early [2003] in selling Obama through the use of very clever arguments that confused what Bill did post 1994 in response to election results which were caused by multiple Democratic congressional scandals, with what had been his original policies when he was newly elected. Alter is effectively trying to backtrack…to the point that few will associate him with that idiocy.

  83. 83.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 3:36 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    And they didn’t fucking buy off people in HCR, they made a deal before negotiations started. They agreed to pre-kill outcomes that weren’t favorable to a whole subset.
    __
    That the decision was necessary can be argued. But it wasn’t part of negotiations. They agreed to it with 3rd parties before ever dealing with Congress.

    Um, they did both. They coopted business interests that had done a lot to kill the HCR effort in the 1990s, and then they bought off (IIRC) Landrieu, Lincoln, and Nelson. And they were _not_ showered with praise for their common-sensical bargaining.

    Again, I’m not saying that the final form of the stimulus or HCR was the policy they should have sought all along. I’m simply saying that, in light of the (large) number of conservative Democrats and (small) number of constructive Republicans, they probably made the best of a _fundamentally_ difficult situation, and everything else is theater criticism: they should have talked tougher, they should have made more speeches, they should have done things in a different order, etc. If you have to deal with a Senate Democratic caucus that is probably 50% center-right, _they are going to make things less liberal_, irrespective of how you choose to handle them.

    I personally would love to see the government hire millions of people directly, even to the Keynesian caricature of digging holes and then filling them up. It would be great. Why doesn’t that happen? It’s not only because of Mitch McConnell and Jim DeMint and David Vitter. It’s also because of Jim Webb and Claire McCaskill as well as Blanche Lincoln. A cohort of economic advisors who recommended undertaking large-scale Depression-era public works programs wouldn’t be able to get that idea past the gauntlet of Senate _Democrats_. So why waste time worrying over why the Obama administration doesn’t propose things there’s no reason to believe can happen in the first place?

  84. 84.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 3:41 pm

    @Corner Stone: Rant at center-right Senate Democrats. They’re the reason why policy-making has been suboptimal. I’m explaining why things have played out as they have. You’re mad because things are not better, but your explanation for why is “Obama sucks.” That’s a useless non-explanation.

  85. 85.

    Tecumseh

    August 7, 2010 at 3:51 pm

    @FlipYrWhig: Exactly. In ten or fifteen years people are going to say Obama got HCR passed and saved the banks and auto industry. They’re not going to say Obama passed HCR but should have fought harder for the public option and didn’t give enough speeches or TARP helped make the financial system solvent again but he didn’t bash the bankers enough.

    As for the stimulus, whether Obama could have gotten more is going to be THE big question about his administration and I don’t know if there will ever be a correct answer. I do think the number he chose was picked because it was seen as more politically doable and I also think that they might have thought they could get another shot at it and that the state of the economy was so bad they could pick up some Republican support. They did not. Hell, they’re probably still banging their heads on the table over the stupidity of the Republicans as unemployment increases. Still, he could have Krugman, Reich, and the ghost of John Keynes on his economic team right now and he still couldn’t get a damn thing passed through the Senate.

    Oh, finally “the art of the possible” is what it is because it’s all about getting something done, not trying to tilt at windmills. Why focus energy on something that will never happen when you can focus on something that will happen. To think otherwise is foolish.

  86. 86.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 3:54 pm

    @Corner Stone: Or, to use your words, explain how “go[ing] for what was needed” was supposed to happen.

    “Our projections show that we need $1.5T.”
    “My God, that much?”
    “Yes.”
    “What will happen if we don’t?”
    “Massive unemployment and a piss-poor economy as far as we can see.”
    “But that’s so much money… I already have people calling my office and yelling about the bank bailout and the auto industry bailout… and now I have to tell them we’re spending one and a half trillion dollars? Can we start with, like, a down payment?”
    “Spending less is going to be much less effective.”
    “But more than a trillion dollars? They’re going to crucify me. This is a rough state for Democrats anyway. I can’t do it.”

    How many Senators can you picture sounding like that? I think it’s at least 20. And maybe 10 would cave from pressure. And 10 wouldn’t. So there wouldn’t be enough votes. So you have to scale it back _even when you know you’re making the policy worse_.

    I don’t think this is difficult to understand. I think it’s regrettable, but it’s the inevitable result of a political scene that resulted from the center-right shifting to the Democratic party, and from some of those center-right Democrats having won by positioning themselves as brakes on the liberalism _that you and I wear with pride_.

  87. 87.

    mclaren

    August 7, 2010 at 4:10 pm

    Obama was a charismatic but inexperienced and mediocre legislator who grabbed a ride on the history train into the Oval Office.

    Alas, when he arrived in the Oval Office, he was still inexperienced and mediocre. So he got conned by the master con artists in the Pentagon, who told him they’d win the war if he just gave them the money and the manpower. Better smarter wiser men than Obama have been scammed by the Pentagon masters of deceit — viz., Eisenhower, who realized he has being ripped off by an out-of-control military-industrial complex, but was powerless to prevent it.

    And Obama got scammed by the economists — millions of people have been mesmerized by the three-card-monte masters with PhDs in economics, convinced to hand over their life savings, only to watch their wealth evaporate in the stock market. So that’s no surprise.

    Obama got rolled by phoney HCR reform, conned by non-reform Wall Street reform, buffaloed by sweet-talking phonies who stroked his ego and promised to end the war on drugs only to crank it right back up again in order to combat the Mexican cartels.

    This is what happens when an inexperienced mediocre guy winds up in the Oval Office. Better than having a sociopathic ignorant grossly incompetent C student in the Oval Office, I’ll grant you, but compared with a savvy master administrator like Clinton (who had his own Afghanistan/Iraq moment with Somalia and got the hell out pronto), Obama is a Harvard-educated hopelessly naive dupe utterly lacking in any kind of street smarts who is fumbling and bumbling and stumbling and bungling his way through a disastrously failed presidency.

    Obama’s real talent is the luck to have incredibly inept enemies. The Republicans make Obama look like Solon by comparison.

  88. 88.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 4:17 pm

    @FlipYrWhig: Let’s say I sold your car:
    Me: Hey man, great news! I sold your car for $15K!
    You: But I needed $18K. You knew that!
    Me: Yeah but I was dealing with a very conservative buyer, w/ a family at home to take care of. $15K was the best I was ever going to get.
    You: Ok. But did you at least try to get the $18K?
    Me: Nah. When they showed up I told them I’d take $15K for it. And that’s what they agreed to.
    You: WTF?! Dammit!!

  89. 89.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 4:22 pm

    @Tecumseh:

    Oh, finally “the art of the possible” is what it is because it’s all about getting something done, not trying to tilt at windmills. Why focus energy on something that will never happen when you can focus on something that will happen. To think otherwise is foolish.

    No, the “art of the possible” is and has long been a catechism of the establishment. It’s a copout pablum to spoonfeed the people who are longing to believe.

  90. 90.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 4:28 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    You’re mad because things are not better, but your explanation for why is “Obama sucks.” That’s a useless non-explanation.

    That is absolutely not true. And it’s fucking bullshit to frame it that way.
    I’m saying that several outcomes have come about exactly how the WH has wanted them to.
    How can you argue against that?
    So to say Obama sucks is a weaksauce shorthand to get the howlers to howl.
    I’m saying that in specific cases it’s obvious that things have gone exactly how Obama or the WH have gamed them out.

  91. 91.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 4:45 pm

    @Corner Stone: Amusing. But I think it would be more like, I needed $18K because I didn’t have health insurance and I came down with a horrible disease that was getting worse every day. So I enlisted you, an ace salesman, to sell my car. You listed it for me at $20K, because I took really good care of it and that’s what the Kelly Blue Book said its value was, but no one even came to look at that price. So you called around to everyone you knew was looking to buy and found someone who would give $15K. I would have to decide if it was worth it to take the $15K on the table and buy as much treatment as I could get, or to keep waiting to see if that $18K would materialize to fund my state-of-the-art treatment before I died.

  92. 92.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 4:46 pm

    @Corner Stone: OK, fine, you didn’t say “Obama sucks,” you said, “Things suck, and it’s all according to plan.”

  93. 93.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 4:55 pm

    @FlipYrWhig: Nope. You told me you needed $18K and I sold it for $15K w/o haggling.
    You didn’t get a choice. It’s gone.
    Sorry to hear about your issues. Hope $15K helps you get to the other side. But if not? Meh.

  94. 94.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 4:56 pm

    @FlipYrWhig: I said, “Some outcomes are clearly according to the decisions of the WH.”
    Make of that whatever you will.

  95. 95.

    mclaren

    August 7, 2010 at 5:05 pm

    “Obama sucks” is shorthand for:

    1) Obama is a rotten administrator. He picked bad people from the git-go. Geithner, Summers, McChrystal, all inept fools and clowns. When you staff your administration with inept fools, you get incompetent folly.

    2) Obama is weak-willed and indecisive. He let Larry Summers take control of his administration by acting as gatekeeper. The president is the gatekeeper. Faced with strong opposition, Obama folds and backs down. That’s a failure of character.

    3) Obama is a temporizer who always tries to split the difference. In normal times that might not be a problem, but we live in a period of crisis where critical issues now require drastic solutions. “Splitting the difference” between the Project For A New American Century’s 100 wars all over the world and the peacenik’s no foreign wars results in 2 unwinnable foreign wars. That’s not acceptable. Splitting the difference between torture and no torture gives you milder gentler torture, and that’s not acceptable. Splitting the difference between continued Wall Street corruption and real reform gives you phony reform that doesn’t change anything, and that’s not acceptable. Incidentally, “not acceptable” means “systemic collapse” here.

    4) Obama is gullible. Experts can buffalo him and manipulate him by using big words and fast talk. He lacks the street smarts to recognize when he’s been conned and lied to. Obama was conned and lied to about Afghanistan and Iraq, he was conned and lied to about health care reform, he was conned and lied to about financial reform, and he’s being conned and lied to about structural unemployment in the American economy, which is likely to continue to rise past 12% up to 20% and then 30% and 40% and 50% and 60%, up and up and up without an upper limit, as automation destroys more and more jobs formerly done by humans.

    5) Obama lacks street smarts. He’s superbly educated in the classroom and he writes extremely well, but put him out on the streets and he’s helpless. The sharks bleed him.

    6) Obama is a captive of the system. He went through Harvard, he breezed into the senate, he’s seen the system work for him and he falsely concludes that this means the system is basically sound and works for everyone. In reality, we live in an era where most of the systems in America are breaking down. The current cost of college is unsustainable so America’s system of higher eduction is collapsing, the cost and failure to win wars of our military is unsustainable so America’s post-WW II miliary system is breaking down. Automation + the internet is destroying jobs so fast that the American middle class is breaking down. Giant monopolies have created such powerful cartels that market capitalism in America is breaking down, aided by the rise of open source movements like wikipedia and linux. America’s medical-industrial system is breaking down, our criminal justice system is breaking down, everywhere you look basic American institutions are falling apart under the strain and collapsing. Obama is a guy created by the system who believes in the system who lives in an era where the system is failing but he doesn’t realize it. He thinks the solution is to fine-tune and tinker around the edges with the system, not rebuild it from the ground up. FDR faced the same dilemma but he made the right choice — he changed things radically because the alternative was total collapse. Obama has not recognized the need for radical change in basic American institutions, and this is leading us toward total collapse.

    This is why Obama has largely failed to fulfill his promises despite what seem to be good intentions.

    Specific enough for you?

  96. 96.

    General Stuck

    August 7, 2010 at 5:24 pm

    Robin quick, back to the Bat Cave!!

  97. 97.

    mclaren

    August 7, 2010 at 5:50 pm

    @geg6:

    Why anyone would listen to Tim Geithner and Larry Summers over Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jamie Galbreath, or Paul Volcker is beyond me.

    Because these people are brilliant and highly articulate and most of all, because they’ve sucked all the oxygen from the room by making sure there’s no one but people exactly like them saying exactly the same things at the levers of power. People with power tend to promote underlings who think and act the same way.

    Faced with uniformity of opinion from seemingly brilliant experienced people, most of us will fold and accept the consensus of the experts, even if that consensus seems counterintuitive and wrong. It takes an exceptionally strong personality to stand up in a front of a group of prestigious highly-educated people and say “You’re all wrong and what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense.” Even if what they’re saying obviously doesn’t make any sense.

    Oh, c’mon, not the Rahm demonzation again. This is all down to Obama’s character failures. Rahm is a non-issue.

    Obama faces the same kind of problem FDR did. During the Great Depression, all the economic experts agreed that the dollar had to be pegged to the gold standard. They were wrong. FDR realized that and acted directly opposite to the experts’ advice, threw out the gold standard, and the U.S. economy was saved as a result. Obama hasn’t had the gumption to tell the experts they’re wrong. Wrong about Afghanistan and Iraq, wrong about the need to reduce deficits right now, wrong about the impracticality of getting rid of profit in America’s medical-industrial complex, wrong about the need for a large U.S. military, wrong about the viability of the War on Drugs, wrong about the constitutionality of ordering the assassination of American citizens without trial or charges.

    Obama’s lack of guts and perspicacity is the problem. Not Rahm.

  98. 98.

    General Stuck

    August 7, 2010 at 5:59 pm

    This is all down to Obama’s character failures

    This is funny, coming from an insane person.

  99. 99.

    Tecumseh

    August 7, 2010 at 6:04 pm

    @Corner Stone: Which brings us to neverending discussions of the Overton Window. It’s sad but true that politics (or at least for in regards to liberal politics) revolves around whatever arbitrary baseline is set up by a political Establishment that thinks the world is Center-Right and it’s still (take your pick) 1986, 1990, or 2004. One of the big goals should be to move that little baseline more to the left and give Obama and the Democrats more room to do more progressive things but that’s not happening right now as it appears that baseline is going off the rails into Crazytown. Obama hasn’t been great in trying to move that baseline but he does try more than he’s given credit for. Unfortunately, when he does it doesn’t get very far due to his inability to do snappy soundbites or it being completely ignored by the press (“blah…blah…blah…tax policy….Look! Michelle’s having a nice vacation in Spain with the kids and FOX is in uproar and Maureen Dowd is mocking them! Let’s debate this for weeks!”).

    As for the “art of possible” I still believe it’s better to get HCR passed than not passed and passing no stimulus would have been a disaster. As a man once much wiser than me said “do or do not, there is no try.”

  100. 100.

    mclaren

    August 7, 2010 at 6:43 pm

    @Tecumseh:

    As a man once much wiser than me said “do or do not, there is no try.”

    You’re quoting a muppet to back up your advocacy of Obama’s failed policies?

    Really?

    You’re seriously doing that?

    Wow.

    So far we’ve had the Obama supporters argue in favor of their hero on the basis (A) anyone who criticizes Obama is mentally ill, and (B) by quoting a silly puppet in a kids’ movie.

    That says a lot more about the intellectual bankruptcy of Obama’s supporters than many volumes of data-backed critiques.

  101. 101.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 7, 2010 at 6:45 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    Nope. You told me you needed $18K and I sold it for $15K w/o haggling.
    __
    You didn’t get a choice. It’s gone.
    __
    Sorry to hear about your issues. Hope $15K helps you get to the other side. But if not? Meh.

    The point of my example is that there are many real-life situations in which we get stuck with a worse deal than we wanted, and we deal with it by gritting our teeth and making the best of it, because _under the circumstances_ and _given the time frame_, it could have been much worse. That’s the way I choose to view the high-profile Obama administration policy disputes. You choose to view it as not trying very hard and/or stabbing in the back. I understand that you’ve dug in on these things, but it’s really not the only way to interpret how they played out.

  102. 102.

    Corner Stone

    August 7, 2010 at 6:57 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    That’s the way I choose to view the high-profile Obama administration policy disputes. You choose to view it as not trying very hard and/or stabbing in the back. I understand that you’ve dug in on these things, but it’s really not the only way to interpret how they played out.

    There are facts in evidence. People have gone record as to how the stimulus played out.
    I just don’t know what to say anymore.

  103. 103.

    mclaren

    August 7, 2010 at 8:49 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    I just don’t know what to say anymore.

    Indeed. In response to the assertion that “it’s really not the only way to interpret how they played out” we could always assert that Martians used their brain-control rays to induce dementia into the entire congressional caucus. Or we could hypothesize that the evil congressional democrats tried to sabotage the stimulus package and Obama bravely saved the day. Or we could posit that radioactive yetis from the center of the earth disrupted Obama’s negotiations at the verge of a much bigger stimulus plan, and that’s why things didn’t work out.

    We could interpret lots of things, using fantasy and self-delusion, and if we travel far enough into the realm of Jacques Derrida’s and Jean Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra, we would arrive at the point where “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone. “It means just what I choose it to mean – neither more or less.” (Through the Looking Glass, Charles Dodgson, 1867).

    Out here in the real fucking world, however, it’s a documented fact that many economists were beating the table and screaming for a much larger stimulus. Nobel laureates like Krugman. And they were doing it on the basis of hard numbers, supported by the evidence of previous econometrics from previous recessions. Here’s Krugman’s goddamn column from November 10 2008 where he lays out EXACTLY how much stimulus we’ll need according to the economic math. This is not some obscure mystery with many interpretations. Everyone knew what had to be done, but Obama and company waffled and dithered and as usual Obama blew it because he didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to stand up and hold fast instead of temporizing and splitting the difference.

    It’s absolutely fascinating that the Obama supporters on this forum have now descended into the murky netherworld of Karl Rove’s infinite subjectivity, in which the name of the game is to deny obvious facts and claim there is no such thing as objective truth and every issue is just a matter of interpretation. Global warming? Just a matter of interpretation. Evolution? Depends on how you read the fossil record, the world might be 6000 years old. There is no such thing as truth, Rove and his propagandists tell us, and thereby convince gullible bystanders that, yes, the Tea party supporters threaten violence and stir up anger and hatred against Obama and the Democrats…but the Democrats also threaten violence (ooohh! Ooohh! They’re pointing out that threatening the president is a CRIME, oohh, the Democrats are threatning to call the FBI, ooohhhh, that’s VIOLENCE!) and the Democrats also stir up anger and hatred against the Tea Partiers by pointing out the Tea Partiers are violent hateful bigots. So it’s all just a big postmodern glob of undecidable controversy, and there’s no real truth, and when the Demos call the Tea Partiers hateful ignorant kooks or when Democrats criticize Obama for his many failures, it’s really not the only way to interpret how [things] played out.

    This is a scam. It’s a pack of lies by people who are trying to use smoke and mirrors to distract us from the plain facts about Obama’s obvious failures.

    Read Billmon’s “Spock With A Beard : The Sequel” to see how the Obama supporters are trying to obscure the truth by creating a phony parallel universe where Obama is the great hero and things are much more complicated than anyone can possibly imagine.

    Bullshit. Obama is a weak-willed vacillating temporizer. He got bullied and conned and manipulated into settling for inadequate half measures on the stimulus package. Just as Obama got bullied and conned and manipulated into the Afghan surge, just as Obama has gotten bullied and conned and manipulated into greenlighting a gigantic out-of-control national security Surveillance State that does nothing to protect us but provides an endless river of gold for connected beltway insiders.

    We always knew the Obots didn’t have a clear grasp on reality. What we didn’t suspect until now is that they would go all the way into Karl Rove territory to lie and scam and create an entire fabricated parallel universe of pure bullshit in order obscure the unpleasant truth about their hero.

  104. 104.

    CalD

    August 7, 2010 at 8:59 pm

    I was just looking at Consumer Confidence Index numbers. They’re pretty bad but not as bad as they were — actually up quite a bit for the year. I think this could well be a case where the people are smarter than the pundits. You typically see a lag of several months at the end of a recession between the time business get into the black and the time they get confident enough of staying that way to start hiring in significant numbers. But a lot of businesses are making money now.

  105. 105.

    mclaren

    August 7, 2010 at 9:57 pm

    @CalD:

    I fervently hope you’re right.

    Several flies in that ointment. First, the commercial real estate collapse has yet to hit, and when it does, all indications suggest it’ll be bigger and worse than the home mortgage meltdown of 2007. Second, the stimulus runs out later this year, and that’s when things get real ugly for states that are on the verge of defaulting. Third, ten states are so far underwater fiscally that they are technically in default now and only smoke and mirrors keeps them propped up. California’s the most obvious example. But Illinois and Nevada and Michigan are also deep into uncharted fiscal territory, drowning in seas of red ink that no possible bond issues or tax increases can fix. What will happen if CA goes bust?

    It’s the world’s 7th largest economy. Nobody knows.

    Fourth, the Wall Street casino games haven’t ended. Our unregulated financial system hasn’t been fixed. The financial reform does nothing about the shadow banking system, so we’re building up for another bubble and another crash even bigger than the last one. This time, the bubble is in unregulated dark pools that trade in obscurity, with prices not revealed and risks never disclosed. What happens if we get another Lehman Brother crash…but this time in the dark pools of the world’s shadow banking system, which is some 60 times larger than the total amount of capital circulating in the NYSE and NASDAQ and bond markets?

    Once again, nobody knows.

    It’s possible we’ll navigate all these minefields without meaningful systemic reform. It could happen. Magic unicorns could also appear and start shitting gold out of their asses and make us all rich. Not a good idea to count on either possibility.

  106. 106.

    General Stuck

    August 7, 2010 at 9:58 pm

    @mclaren: @mclaren:

    We always knew the Obots didn’t have a clear grasp on reality. What we didn’t suspect until now is that they would go all the way into Karl Rove territory to lie and scam and create an entire fabricated parallel universe of pure bullshit in order obscure the unpleasant truth about their hero.

    LMaorotf — Lex Luther and Otis V Superman, the blog.

  107. 107.

    Elie

    August 8, 2010 at 12:03 am

    @FlipYrWhig:

    It’s almost as though people who want to complain will always find justification for it!

    It is easier to call Obama out, grind and bitch, than to assume responsibility yourself or for one’s ideas. Making this even more complex is that the time frames to see what works or doesnt and to what degress is variable and even then, what is “win” and “loss” to any one group is not consistent…

    Obama is the Roscharch (sp?) test for the liberal and right winged policy/political machines… we want to argue and fight.

    Does he see his job as just keeping the good ship lollypop aflot in the next 4 to 8 years — assuming that there is no way that the fixes he proposes will reasonably be known to work by then but he has to keep us from self destructing long enough to kick it to the next (hopefully reasonably competent POTUS). People these days are just nuts — fucking nuts — the expectation I read upstring to “fix” corporatism and all the other distortions by fiat — geez — makes me wonder about how smart some on the left truly are…

    After decades of fucked up social and economic policy, it seems that a bunch of folks expected that the election of the first black President was just going to adjust and fix all that, just like that. The same people expected that after decades of beating down and shrinking government, particularly all over the SAWTH, that there would be droves of government people in place to prevent one ounce of oil from reaching, much less contaminating one blade of grass on the shore..

    Up here where I live, the Northwest hillbillies wanted to make government get off their backs by rescinding the regulation of their septic systems…

  108. 108.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 8, 2010 at 12:11 am

    @Corner Stone:

    People have gone record as to how the stimulus played out.

    They said “That’s what we wanted all along,” not “We made the best deal we can”? Because everything I read, even the stuff about how Summers never presented the Romer numbers or whatever, still is _easily_ explicable as “We knew we couldn’t get everything we wanted, but we had to act fast.”

    This isn’t far-fetched conspiracy nonsense. This is the way people behave in real-life negotiations under pressure. Watch any home-buying show on HGTV, or just hold a damn garage sale, and witness the same thing happening over and over and over again: you want a certain dollar value, the person across the table won’t give it, and you have to decide what to do. Everything that happened with the stimulus is just a scaled-up version of selling your almost-new futon for $80 when you’re moving next weekend, you can’t fit it on the truck, and the buyer has cash.

    It’s a reasonable line of criticism to say, “I wish they would have tried harder to get a higher dollar figure,” but it’s really, _really_ easy to explain why trying harder was unlikely to work, and the answer is that a huge proportion of Democrats in Congress, especially in the Senate, are conservative, and intelligent macroeconomic arguments don’t persuade them, and threats don’t persuade them, because you’re trying to sell them on a liberal “big spending” policy and that’s not how they roll. That’s the reason. It doesn’t matter if the policy was cooked up by Summers, Geithner, Romer, Paulson, Krugman, Stiglitz, or Reich. It was “big spending” after repeated earlier spates of “big spending.” Ben Fucking Nelson isn’t even being helpful with _small_ amounts of spending. You have no solution to this. You just say that Obama shoulda got ‘er dun. And he _did_ get it done! But still you bitch that it wasn’t done all proper-like, so, it must have been that he deliberately wanted to spite you, or he was a coward, or he was an idiot.

    Seriously. Just game it out like you were a not-very-bright Democratic Senator from a Republican-leaning state, who likes to talk about “fiscal responsibility” and does not want to be thought of as a free-spending liberal. You and I would say that the thing to do is back the biggest stimulus possible because it will improve the economy the most, and let the local Republicans squeal about the cost, because we can win that argument: jobs are more important than the deficit, and we saw the people of our state hurting, so we had to help. That’s because we’re liberals and we like to fight for our vision. But, oops, in this role-playing exercise, we’re neither one of those. In that light, instead, we want to say that while some in our party wanted to throw money at the problem, we supported only certain targeted spending, and tax cuts, because the government needs to be responsible and make tough choices. We want to say we don’t vote in lockstep with those Big-Spending Liberals up there in Washington. We’re pretty stupid. And there are at least 20 of us.

  109. 109.

    Elie

    August 8, 2010 at 12:12 am

    @mclaren:

    Obama has gotten bullied and conned and manipulated into greenlighting a gigantic out-of-control national security Surveillance State that does nothing to protect us but provides an endless river of gold for connected beltway insiders

    .

    Ha,ha,ha,ha…

    You are soo spoofy!

  110. 110.

    MNPundit

    August 8, 2010 at 6:32 am

    @BR: Uh, that IS a technocrat.

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