I’m looking at the news, and it occurs to me that it sort of feels like, to me, at least, that the administration has just been overtaken by events and we’re really not hearing anything about their domestic agenda anymore. It’s understandable, of course- the events in Japan and the cascading events all over the Middle East are quite dramatic, and when you consider the laser-like focus we had on DADT and HCR, there was bound to be a drop-off. Plus, losing the House is kind of a big deal. And, it isn’t because they aren’t trying- they are still doing their thing with lots going on. I’m just wondering if they are ever going to get back to the domestic agenda AND have it get some media attention.
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Short Bus Bully
I’ve been wondering the exact same thing. They have been overwhelmed and it’s a shame because I would like to see them hammer the Rethugs on their lack of a budget of their own. They are taking all the pot shots at the administration but are REFUSING to put their own ideas up for review.
cleek
not until we’re done with Libya. and by “done with”, i mean “bored with talking about”. and by “we”, i mean “the media”.
then, and only then, will we return to our discussion of why the Dems are ruining America, as usual, and how the GOP has its finger on the pulse of what we all want, as usual, and why the only solution is everything the GOP wants.
Omnes Omnibus
The people in the domestic departments have been working on the Administration’s priorities along. Media attention is a horse of a different color.
Zifnab
The Senate has been very quiet, and I think the House has a lot to do with that. I was hoping to see them bus through some of those appointments that have been languishing for the last year. But I suspect the Senate is just staying off the radar as much as possible in the run up to ’12, with Democrats at a 2:1 disadvantage coming up for reelection.
As for the broader domestic agenda, it’s all budget budget budget. The GOP House won’t touch the White House agenda out of spite. Until Boehner decides whether he wants to go through with a government shutdown, it’s going to remain a stalemate. Once he shows his hand, it’ll be a shutdown fight or it’ll indicate caving and compromise. That’ll drive the agenda going forward.
Comrade DougJ
I think Obama is unlucky, snakebit, just like Jimmy Carter.
zmulls
No, the Obama administration is not going to get the ink and pixels it should. The Obama administration prefers a low-key tone and a quiet go-about-your-business attitude.
The media will go with whoever provides them the most colorful story and the most interesting “characters.” The Republicans figured that out even before Bravo started showing “Real Housewives”….
Punchy
Facing stiff competetion, Wiener pulls it out and fires off a hot load of HCR news. Claims repeal is already pre-cooked. Which everyone but eeemom and Armando have acknowledged. But THEN claims this is good, cuz single-payer is just around the corner. Around the corner of the galaxy, perhaps.
Benjamin Cisco
@Zifnab: Agreed; our Ferengi-based entertainment complex is waiting with baited breath to see if everything old really is new again; until then, it’s Libya, Libya, Libya on the label, label, label, unless a celebrity makes a complete and utter jackass out of him/herself or shuffles off the mortal coil.
Jim, Once
Domestic agenda, Maine style (from a sibling of mine in that state):
http://www.sunjournal.com/state/story/1004031
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
OO: Actually, the domestic departments have been focused on cutting operating costs and are prevented from starting new projects by the CR.
Martin
Not sure what they’re supposed to say when House Republicans can’t seem to figure out which end is up. They seem to be doing just fine fighting amongst themselves.
As for the HCR rulings – yeah, single-payer is inevitable, but it’ll never get past the teabagger House. Dems are going to have to win more elections to make that go. The House will happily drain the nations coffers if it means they can keep screaming about death panels.
Dave
Apparently, the big problem (according to Fox News, Jimmy Fallon and others) is that the President filled out NCAA brackets for ESPN. Which is a level of commentary one step above “Idiocracy”.
cmorenc
NO ONE in America is (quietly) more grateful for the Libyan situation and the Japanese Earthquake/Tsunami completely sucking all the media oxygen away from domestic events than mis-Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Before all this happened, he and the Wisconsin republicans were trapped for days in the eyewall of a hurricane of negative media attention, and it looked for once that much of the media was actually waking up and paying attention to the audaciously dishonest, crass goals of the right-wing GOP assault on the middle-class, the immense gap between what they were claiming to do and what they were actually doing according to…well, objective facts.
Alas, and then along came the earthquake, providing much more dramatic footage, a much shinier object for the media to focus on than a bunch of DFHs in Wisconsin.
mclaren
Obama’s domestic agenda collapsed because of his cowardice and dishonesty. He came in promising transformative change and wound up enacting the McCain administration’s agenda — more torture, more kidnapping, ordering the assassination of U.S. citizens without trial or even criminal charges, more unwinnable endless foreign wars, no Wall Street reform, no health care reform…just more of the same Bush/Cheney shit.
Weiner is drunk or on hard drugs. When the Supremes rule against the HCR bill, all efforts to reform health care in America will collapse. That’s when the riots start.
We’re rapidly heading back to the days of the Pullman Strike. Look for state governors to call out the national guard to shoot sick people mobbing the entrances to ERs after HCR gets struck down.
fasteddie9318
@cleek:
This already may be starting. After all, a 79 year old woman with congestive heart failure died, so we need to spend a lot of time talking about that.
Citizen_X
Well, maybe Boehner can rein the Teabaggers in, but it looks like the House GOOPers are picking defunding Planned Parenthood as their hill to die on. In other words, “Kill Planned Parenthood or we shut down the government.”
Nice to know that a) the Tea Party Movement is not focussed on those pesky social issues, as we were told again and again and again, and b) the Republicans still have that laser-like focus on jobs!
David in NY
@Punchy: Is there any possibility Wiener would like say, Anthony Kennedy or maybe even John Roberts, to think ruling against HCR would pave the way for single payer? Nah.
Svensker
@mclaren:
I’m reading this and thinking WTF and then saw who wrote it. Never mind.
Bob Loblaw
@Omnes Omnibus:
What?! Are you sure?
Man, I could’ve sworn the people working for the administration were actively working against the administration’s policies. Good thing we have Captain Obvious to set the record straight.
Martin
@Benjamin Cisco: It’s ‘bated breath’. Bated means to hold back, so it means to hold your breath. I’m not sure what I’d want to bait my breath with, anyway. Worms? Fish? Ick.
WarMunchkin
@cleek: They got bored with the humanitarian suffering in Japan in what, 2 days? Then they switched to the nuclear stuff because, as we all know, it’s all about us. And then Libya happened. I’ll give it another week or so, since there are explosions and shiny things.
Linnaeus
I gotta say, things do feel like they’re coming to a head somehow – a crisis moment, if you will – but I’m very anxious as to how it will all end.
David in NY
@WarMunchkin: Yeah, even John’s fave, the NYT, didn’t have much on the real disaster in Japan today.
Sentient Puddle
@mclaren: A solid B- effort, but I expect significantly more from someone who says that anyone paying attention sees that America is a third-world country.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bob Loblaw: I did have you in mind when I wrote it, so I am glad you appreciated it.
kdaug
@zmulls:
“No drama Obama”. They are more than happy to work behind the scenes.
catclub
@Comrade DougJ: Two years in and a majority of people are STILL blaming Bush for the bad economy, is bad luck he can live with.
Obama got a fortune cookie that said – “All your opponents will drive themselves crazy.”
Starting with senate race, Clinton, McCain, who is next?
rikryah
the media has a ridiculous attention span. they cannot walk and chew gum. Libya is the new shiny object, where the old shiny object – the possible nuclear meltdown – ist still right there.
fasteddie9318
@Sentient Puddle:
Well, according to our income inequality and import/export mix…
I kid, I kid. Sort of.
ruemara
Oh, Cole. Honey Lamb. Even when there wasn’t a Japan & Libya, the media paid no attention to the Obama White House domestic agenda. It paid attention to Princess Snowbilly Bumpits, Commissar Glenn Frothits and a million other distrations.
Martin
@Dave: Shorter GOP and Villagers: Nigger shouldn’t be doing nigger things. We like ‘cowboy’ things on a ‘ranch’.
eemom
@Punchy:
To “repeal” a law is a legislative act.
To strike down a law as unconstitutional is a judicial act.
fyi, just in case you don’t want to sound like a total idiot.
Keith G
Obot as I can be, their “message machine” has always sucked. Maybe Daley will help, but I have not seen any great new skills emerge yet.
The Moar You Know
@mclaren: Yes, because the poor are benefiting so much from HCR right now that they will riot to keep their benefits that they get under a law that won’t be implemented until 2014.
Americans don’t riot. If SCOTUS rules the law unconstitutional, it’ll be a thirty-second news blip for most people in between back-to-back episodes of “Glee”, and most of them will mutter something about how the goddamn government is stealing all their money anyway, so good.
This part you got right, though.
Brachiator
Apart from health care, much of Obama’s time was spent shoring up the financial markets and emergency fiscal stimulus. But neither the Democrats in Congress nor the Obama Administration seemed to have much interest in a comprehensive domestic agenda that did anything really significant with respect to taxes and jobs.
Congress dropped the ball big time on this. As near as I can tell, some Democrats tried to take a pass on tax reform in order to save their asses and still ended up being rolled by the Tea Party People. And now, the House, where tax legislation begins, is controlled by the Republicans.
But Obama was also hampered by poor choices for secretaries of Commerce and Labor, and by a Treasury Department of technocrats and minutiae men. The only bright hope right now is Elizabeth Warren, who has yet to be fully unleashed.
Note also that Secretary of Commerce Locke has been nominated to be ambassador to Japan. Maybe somebody realizes that you got to have fresh eyes here.
trollhattan
There’s this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/opinion/23wed2.html
Tractarian
Um, everyone knew after the electoral massacre of November 2010 that all we’d be getting in the next two years is gridlock.
It isn’t surprising in the slightest that the administration dropped its focus on domestic initiatives and that the media has followed suit.
gene108
Not possible in our system of government. Change takes time. The problem with our system of government and dramatic changes is we tend to leave the losers alive and even allow them positions of power in the new government.
For example Senator John McCain lost the 2008 Presidential race, yet he is still in the Senate and has a voice on what the country should be doing.
How can we implement, swift, trans formative change, while allowing the losers of political contests to not only remain alive, but to stick around in government?
I don’t know. I don’t think it is possible.
gene108
@trollhattan: Somebody should inform Gov. Corbett of PA. He’s doing his damnedest to make sure the natural gas companies have no accountability to the people of Pennsylvania.
Brachiator
@gene108:
And yet the strange thing is that the GOP, empowered by the Tea Party People, at the state and federal level, are steamrolling all kinds of negative change. And the Republican Empire is striking back at the federal level, picking up where the Bush/Cheney regime left off, with their false promises of prosperity through stupidity and ignorance.
For some reason, the Democrats lack both energy and focus. The Obama Administration promised much, and I give them credit in a number of areas, but they have failed to take advantage of some opportunities even as they deal with massive opposition from the Republicans.
Benjamin Cisco
@Martin: I stand corrected, but I normally bait my breath with Scope, thanks.
cat48
Actually, this trip was about jobs, exports. There were articles in some papers about how much the US exports to Brazil & areas where they would attempt to increase more products, 7th biggest economy; some business owners from NJ & PA & other states met him there at a Business Summit they had; they just struck offshore OIL & they were consulting about retrieving that; and Contractors are attempting to get jobs/contracts there to build for the Olympics there in 2016.
Of course, that was not covered & 2 Cabinet members who could have made TV appearances were traveling with him. Exports in a smaller amt to Chile. El Salvador Drug War mainly covered.
He can’t be on TV himself daily, but he’s also working on new Education programs. He needs to get someone to make appearances b/c Congress Dems refuse to do it. They come on TV when their feefees are hurt only to complain he should be impeached or tell everybody they’re skeert of nuclear power, etc. He better step it up.
MGLoraine
There’s only one item on the White House to-do list: get Obama re-elected in 2012. Their “concern” for events abroad or at home are influenced by what effect they will have on Objective #1.
Suck It Up!
Well, that’s what you’re doing wrong. you’ll never find out what he’s up to that way.
gene108
@Brachiator:
I was making more a general point and thinking about changes Presidents have made.
Generally, there have been very few transformative Presidents. I think FDR was probably the last one we had. You could say Nixon was unintentionally transformative because of Watergate.
Ronald Reagan acquiesced to reality, when his 1981 tax cuts created problems and raised taxes. When his attempt to gut Social Security was unanimously defeated in the Senate, he worked out a compromise with Tip O’Neal that has left Social Security solvent to 2037.
The Republican assault on the New Deal wasn’t very popular in the 1980’s, since so many people who were working, back then, had themselves or had parents and grandparents, who made it through the 1930’s because of the New Deal.
People think Bush, Jr. ran rough-shod over all opposition. Outside of the knee-jerk reaction to 9/11/01 and the expansion of the police state, his domestic policies were built around pre-empting Democratic ideas and goals.
On domestic issues, Bush, Jr.’s biggest successes had some level of bi-partisan support. Things like expanding the Department of Education, expanding Medicare and the tax cuts, were something that appealed to some Democrats, including liberals like the late Tedd Kennedy, who pushed Medicare expansion through the Senate.
He had two failures, one was bi-partisan – immigration reform – while the other was a sop to right-wing ideologues – privatizing Social Security.
What the Republican governors and state legislators are doing is unprecedented in recent times. It’ll be interesting to see how much of a backlash gets created because of it and how permanent the damage they cause will be.
On a Presidential level, we’ve had very few truly transformative Presidents.
Suck It Up!
Never promised you it would be quick nor easy. In fact he warned us about these types of days several times during the campaign.
Brachiator
@gene108:
I see your point. But Obama needed to be a transformative president, both because of the damage caused by Bush/Cheney and the damage coming from the present GOP and the Tea Party.
I give Obama a mixed review and, as I said, noted the mediocrity of most of the current Democrats in Congress as well as the lackluster quality of some of Obama’s cabinet appointments, particularly some of the former Clinton people.
Allan
I think you kind-of answered your own question within your post.
1) This is what Presidents do when they don’t control the House.
2) The real work of the Executive branch takes place in broad daylight but it attracts no media attention. The departments are all busily writing regulations, revising policies, and shifting their focus in alignment with the president’s goals, but that’s not as fun as writing about what Sarah Palin twatted.
Lost in the Libya NFZ resolution story was the fact that the UN issued a joint statement on ending acts of violence and related human rights violations based on sexual orientation & gender identity, with the active involvement of the US delegation and the State Dept.
In some ways, it also benefits the administration that the media focus is so myopic, as it allows some good stuff to slide under the radar emitted by Newt Gingrich’s p_enis.
Corner Stone
@Brachiator:
I’m a little queasy to say that at this point, one of the best nominations was for Ray LaHood.
Brachiator
@Corner Stone: RE: noted the mediocrity of most of the current Democrats in Congress as well as the lackluster quality of some of Obama’s cabinet appointments, particularly some of the former Clinton people
Yep. Agreed. By the way, I respect Gary Locke and Hilda Solis, secretaries of Commerce and Labor, respectively. I just don’t think that they have been especially effective. I also think that Treasury has been too influential on tax policy, which is a mistake simply because I think that their macroeconomic focus is too narrow.
Cris
Read Nixonland, if you haven’t. Perlestein makes a great case that Nixon changed this country’s entire political atmosphere, and we’re still living in his world.
Brachiator
This just in, more verification that economy requires attention:
Yutsano
@Brachiator:
A native speaker of Chinese doesn’t hurt either.
(PS he’s being nominated to replace Huntsman. So Locke is going to China.)