Things like this haven’t gotten enough attention:
Here’s a poll of economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business: “The first question asked whether the stimulus increased employment by the end of 2010. Eighty percent of the polled economists agreed. Four percent disagreed. Two percent were uncertain. The second question asked whether, over the long run, the benefits would outweigh the long-term costs (like paying down the extra debt). Forty-six percent agreed. Twelve percent disagreed. Twenty-seven percent were uncertain.”
Twelve percent is probably pretty close to the crazification factor in economics (I would guess it’s higher but I don’t know for sure).
Yes, the stimulus should have been bigger, I’ll admit.
Add it to the long list of times Obama was merely competent and right, instead of being omniscient and omnipotent.
Valdivia
Typo on haven’t on the first line. :)
you can erase this after you fix it.
General Stuck
If only we’d been hit by a massive asteroid made of pure gold.
DougJ
@Valdivia:
Thanks!
David Koch
I can’t believe you guys are talking about the stimulus and not something important like jerry sandusky and Droooooones
Jewish Steel
Waaay OT, I know but:
Welcome to the Pale Hose, Kevin.
Valdivia
funny how economists and constitutional lawyers all agree that the Obama administration did right both with the stimulus and the ACA. but because we now live in a world where reality doesn’t matter, only propaganda (because the journalists in this country abdicated their responsibilities to actually inform us of reality long ago) I guess we will have to do without the ACA and with Austerity = Jobs maths. ugh.
Brachiator
“Four out of five economists recommend stimulus” would make a good commercial.
And the wingiest of wingnuts will see Chicago and ignorantly assume that this is just another bunch of libruls in the tank for Obama.
WereBear
It’s my goto killer line: a wingnut will whine about the economy/the President/the deficit in my presence, and I say, “Every Nobel-prize winning economist on the planet agrees that President Obama saved us from another Great Depression.”
I always get the “jaw drop.” Any whining after that is muted.
Rando
Isn’t the 27% who have three years of results to look over and still can’t make up their minds the true crazification fraction?
maya
@Brachiator:
Chicago is the home of Deep Dish Stimulus. Everyone knows that.
Violet
There’s that number again.
JoeShabadoo
“Twelve percent is probably pretty close to the crazification factor in economics (I would guess it’s higher but I don’t know for sure).”
It is higher. There is a reason Krugman is an outlier, everybody bought into the lies.
MikeJ
@JoeShabadoo: Obviously not everyone bought into the lies, the whole point of this story is that most economists think Obama was right. Economists != economists on tv.
Phil Perspective
@Valdivia: I wouldn’t say did right. I would say okay/somewhat acceptable. Why would anyone listen to Goolsbee and Summers over K-thug, I don’t know.
Hill Dweller
The stimulus was largely undermined by austerity at the state/local level. Without all the cuts post-stimulus, we’d probably be at 7% unemployment right now.
jl
Thanks. Great links. I have not seen the Conley and Duper study yet. The Taylor negatory study is a mess. I don’t think he can be considered a neutral observer anymore.
Sooo…. hate to say it, but Taylor should not be given full weight on the negatory side.
Google Robert Hall if you want a conservative economic view that is more reliable.
Barro position is to argue from a principle of futility. You can’t do controlled experiments in economics so you can’t tell if anything works. Fine, but then you can’t tell whether anything does not work either.
A big problem with statistical studies done since the end of the 1970s is that a huge chunk of the data was from the Great Moderation. Most of the time everything is moving along trend. Fiscal and monetary policy were often reacting to each other (Edit: in opposite directions), and the separate effects of each are difficult to disentangle.
What happens is that most theoretical models predict the same thing, and act like trend exrapolation machines. This is true for models and for statistical estimates that forecast from trend data.
Edit; point being is that when Krugman says that critical turning points that result in big changes are just as important evidence as the fancy pants statistics that deal in averages. That is not just special pleading. There are good methodological reasons for that position.
Maude
@Hill Dweller:
That’s important to point out.
It has raised the unemployment rate and Romney goes around saying that Obama’s policies have failed. FSM, he is stupid.
David Koch
@Phil Perspective: it wasn’t a question of listening to one person over the other, it was a question about getting 60 votes. Dems only had 57 votes at the time (and a number of Dems like Jim Webb were freaking out over the amount). They also wanted to get it passed quickly, and not drag it out in negotiations for 3 months.
So no, it was much more about herding cats.
Dems in congress are no different than Dems on blogs: everyone arguing about who’s right and no one dare tell them get in line, cuz FREEEEEDOM!, that’s why. I mean, can u imagine getting 60 bloggers to agree on something.
Frankensteinbeck
@Phil Perspective:
Because they knew what congress would pass, which was much smaller than the theoretically best size for the stimulus. Congress barely swallowed it as it was. The largest amount that could be wheedled through the Senate defined the size of the stimulus, nothing else.
Hill Dweller
@Frankensteinbeck: Piggy backing on your post, the House’s version of the stimulus was bigger, but in conference the Senate ‘centrists’ arbitrarily had it reduced by 100 billion(including 40 billion in state funding).
Corner Stone
@Hill Dweller:
All completely predicted in real time as the too small stim was passed.
DougJ
@JoeShabadoo:
I have no idea what their real crazification factor is but I can’t imagine there being any group of people for whom it’s much under 15%.
El Cid
It seems to strike a number of people that expressing a view of the stimulus policy which suggests that some different policy might have been more desirable is inherently political; either desirably so, or foolishly so.
A view expressed that held the stimulus as passed as the best possible must be that of an Obot dupe, whereas a view expressed that held the stimulus as passed as somehow not the best possible must be that of a firebagging fantasist. Perhaps the safest approach is to passively observe policies as though a natural phenomena, which are not amenable to our opinions of what would be better.
This still begs the question of how “best” is defined apart from “possible”. If no better policy in even the tiniest manner was possible, how does one even decide for oneself that it was the best?
Even if it’s granted — for the sake of argument — that any larger or better or whatever stimulus was 100% impossible, how can we tell the difference between arguments about economics and policies we should make versus those we should avoid?
How do we know that some policy opinion we’re expressing now won’t wind up being different than some policy as it actually happens? In this case, are we endangering a future policy by pre-emptively expressing an opinion about it? If you argue that you would prefer policy X for such and such reasons but one day policy Y passes, will this mean that from now on you risk being politically naive and undermining a sympathetic politician if you express any opinions on policy matters whatsoever?
Is it pointless to think about such things? If so, how do people decide what it is they support or oppose? How do people think through for themselves what would make things better even as an intellectual exercise?
Is there any time at which one might reasonably consider expressing that some different policy other than the existent one — even if 100% politically impossible — could have or could have had more of certain desirable effects?
If so, at what times, and under what conditions?
Surely there’s some context within which someone could endeavor to make an economic argument which is not seen as a mere appendage to a political analysis.
Otherwise, it becomes very difficult for a person to attempt to think about what exactly it is that he or she might conclude about a particular policy, and what he or she might like or oppose about it.
I mean, even to express the notion that Obama did the best possible under political circumstances logically requires that someone form an opinion about what the best possible would be, and that in itself logically requires that someone have a model of how to distinguish between better and worse and that this model depend upon factors other than an evaluation of what is politically possible.
Otherwise there’s no logical source to draw upon in order to conclude that the best possible was done, since by definition the best possible would in this case be defined by what was done. There has to be some sort of metric or set of metrics about the policy itself which is prior to the political realities of possibilities.
If that were to be the starting point, then there would be no guidelines determining what policy should be passed at all, a restraint which would apply to the very people proposing the policies in the first place. Surely at any time there are infinite ranges of what things may or may not be politically possible, but this doesn’t in an of itself help a politician or adviser decide which among the politically possible things is more or less desirable.
It’s hard to know how to conclude that the best had been done (or had not been done) if the definition of best is dependent upon the definition of what was done. Personally I don’t think it’s inherently a political criticism of Obama to argue that a different or bigger stimulus would have been better. Not inherently. One is a policy argument, or a statement of an economic viewpoint, and the other is a political analysis of what an individual could and could not have done and did or did not choose to do and the probability or improbability of succeeding at the given choice.
Even if someone wants to conclude that the absolute best possible policy was passed, if it’s assumed that no better policy in any way was possible, then it’s not reasonable for anyone to think about the matter at all, much less conclude that the best possible policy was passed.
jl
@Phil Perspective:
Summers is irritating, and arrogant, and often shows a callous attitude But he recently did work with DeLong showing that more fiscal stimulus will probably reduce deficit in (edit: medium and) long run, and how to tell.
I think Summers’ problem when at WH was that he was so arrogant, professionally as well as personally, he just thoughtlessly applied a rule of thumb to how quickly the economy would recover, as if this were a standard post WWII recession. Beside his horrible political and bureaucratic judgment, he was thoughtless about the economics. And blew it big time.
But, shouldn’t dismiss people on that basis. What counts is what they put down on paper, and Summers has reformed himself. Not saying you have to say anything nice about the guy, but judge his work on the individual merits.
Would have been miles better now if he had not been so arrogant and careless when he was in the WH, I admit that.
MikeJ
@Corner Stone:
But that size stimulus *passed*. A larger stimulus couldn’t get out of congress.
If it doesn’t pass congress it doesn’t happen.
DougJ
@MikeJ:
What if he’d just used reconciliation to pass it?
Brad R
@WereBear: So what value are Nobel prizes? Obama won a Peace Prize after two weeks in office….
Corner Stone
@jl: There is absolutely nothing redeeming to Summers. He should be shunned by society and refused entry in any discussion regarding policy or outcomes.
Fuck him. Fuck him in his stupid fucking ass. For all eternity.
David Koch
@Frankensteinbeck: exactly. at the time, there were only 56 Dems. Kennedy was on his death bed. Frankin was still tied up in court. Spector hadn’t switched. Lieberman was an “independent”.
And of the 56 Dems, it included a number conservatives (lincoln, landrieu, webb, bayh, ben nelson, conrad, bauchus, feinstein, tester, pryor, carper, bill nelson, warner, harry reid, etc., etc.).
The vaunted blogosphere is supposed to be literate and based in realty. but no. they’re no better than the corporate media. They act as if 60 raging liberals were ready to rubber stamp anything Obama proposed. First of all, there weren’t 60 votes, and second, 30 to 40 percent of the caucus was comprised of conservatives.
Corner Stone
@MikeJ: The argument that a larger stim could’ve passed is obviously contra since no one gave a shit enough to try to see if it would.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
Based on what you quoted, we can conclude that economists say that the stimulus failed *.
* Politifact has declared this statement to be true.
jl
I don’t care about the politics of it. And I see one advantage to the WH asking for a bigger stimulus even it could not have passed: the ability to say I told you so later.
Turns out, Kristina Romer’s model was good, and given what we thought about the severity of the recession at the time, it gave a very good estimates of the required stimulus. Plug in the real numbers that we now know are better measures of the economy, it still does a very good job at predicting what did happen.
If you have confidence in your model, you need to put your neck out and go with it. Romer’s numbers were a hell of a lot better than Summers’ and other WH economic advisors and Treas. Secty. judgment.
Outcome may not have changed, but the terms of the debate would be better now if Romer’s results were guide to both proposals and WH talking points.
Romers numbers indicated a much bigger stimulus was needed, even given the fact that the recession was much worse than realized a the time.
Martin
@jl:
To who?
Frankensteinbeck
@El Cid:
By examining the context and framing of the argument, since these arguments are rarely put forward in a vacuum as purely intellectual constructs.
Certainly, when it can A) be backed up with any kind of logic or facts other than wishful thinking, and B) it is not being used as a bludgeon to pretend that a success is a failure. The latter is such a common occurrence on the liberal side that discussions of better-than-achieved policies must pass an initial round of suspicion.
It exists, but since the context is partly defined by the people around you, it can be quite hard to achieve. Those hunting support for a dishonest narrative can make detached intellectual discussions a real pain in the ass.
And here is the point where I must contradict you. The definition of best is not defined by what happened. It’s defined by what happened in the context of HOW it happened, taking into account the wrangling that cut down even a slightly larger offered stimulus, the pontificating of the blue dogs about the limits they would accept, and the fact that the stimulus passed only because one Republican changed sides at the last minute. Exactly knowledge is impossible, but it is very, very reasonable to assert that the stimulus could not have been significantly bigger.
Elizabelle
Paul Krugman and his wife, economist Robin Wells, have an article in the NY Review of Books that looks useful.
“Getting Away with It“, a review of
Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery
Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (he of “What’s the Matter with Kansas” fame)
and
Thomas Edsall’s The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity will Remake American Politics
Looks like some meaty, probably depressing reading.
Article concludes (after a mention of Mann and Ornstein’s It’s Even Worse than It Looks, which has apparently sunk without a trace):
Add Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, and you have a bookshelf that will shatter under its own rueful cognizance.
Bookend to JC’s blogpost on Supreme Court institutional rot/the rightwing coup under radar.
At least we’re all drinking by this hour.
Valdivia
if Obama had asked for a bigger stimulus we all know it wouldn’t be seen as a good thing ‘look he wanted to get the right size stimulus’, it would be ‘look he wanted to waste more of your hard earned american money! he is a communist!’
Corner Stone
@Valdivia:
And how was the outcome any different?
Worrying about being screamed at seems like a middle managers anxiety.
Frankensteinbeck
@Corner Stone:
Her point is that not only would asking for a larger stimulus have endangered the stimulus we got without any serious chance to get a better stimulus, it would also not be a rhetorical victory.
Linda Featheringill
@Brad R:
Obama, Nobel:
I suspect the Nobel committee wanted to give Obama some recognition while he was still alive. They didn’t know how long he would live.
I can sympathize with that.
Valdivia
@Corner Stone:
it’s not worrying the result would be the same, but you have people arguing here that it would give Obama the upper hand in the argument, which it wouldn’t have. For me what matters is the result, the rest is extraneous.
ETA: @Frankensteinbeck: thank you, you said it better than I did.
Hill Dweller
@Corner Stone:
Considering there hasn’t been this level of austerity and/or public sector contraction(absent the demobilization of a war) since the Hoover administration, how was it predicted?
In order to predict it, you’d have to know the 2010 wingnut rout would take place. Who was predicting that in early ’08?
fuckwit
@David Koch: Wow, good memory. I’d forgotten about that, Kennedy was down for the count, and Franken still not seated.
I remember a quote of Raaaaaaahm screaming either at or about (I don’t recall which) Krugthlu, hollering “TELL ME HOW YOU’RE GOING TO SEAT THE SENATOR FROM MINNESOTA!!! HOW ARE YOU GOING TO SEAT THE SENATE FROM MINNESOTA, CLOWN??!” or some such.
Obama didn’t have the votes to get ACA passed, and somehow managed to pass it anyway. DREAM not so much, and it appears now the Rethugs are attempting to blame him for their own obstruction.
Corner Stone
@Valdivia:
The result was short term, limited and doomed to retrace. Just as it did.
I’m not sure of the validity of an argument that puts forth a criterion that was known, in real time, to act just as it did.
I, for one, am not making a rhetorical victory argument. We had one chance at a stimulus. This was obvious. No backsies allowed.
jl
@Martin:
“To who?”
To voters. in the next election.
@Valdivia:
” For me what matters is the result, the rest is extraneous. ”
But the results of bad policy are still with us and will remain with us for the foreseeable future. There are always future policies to argue for, and consequent results.
Corner Stone
@Hill Dweller: Are you serious? The employment level, and subsequent state and local employment drop was charted and posted in an obscure little work named the NYT some find in the cushions of their barber shop.
WereBear
@Brad R: So what?
It would not be the first time the Nobel committee moved symbolically. Call me an Obot if you wish, but I think the vast sigh of relief from the rest of the world, as America performed a mid-air 180, was enough to secure him that recognition.
And I do think the Nobel Prize has meaning; as do the wingers I debate.
Valdivia
@jl:
for me the result is what we got or nothing, not what we got an then an ideal policy. it is good to argue what is best for the future, but the constant putting forward of the ideal as some counterfactual when it wasn’t even in the universe of the feasible, seems like a way of undermining the president.
Hill Dweller
@Corner Stone: Link?
Who was predicting the massive austerity starting in 2011? Who was predicting the Republican route in the 2010 elections a couple of months after Obama was sworn in?
Government spending and employment has collapsed in the last 1.5 years, due almost entirely to state/local Republicans.
jl
Looks like I am with the minority here. But predicting the future is hard, and if you can do it, you should use it for all its worth.
So, I think what you want to be able to say is
THEY decided to do THAT, and THEY said you would get Y.
WE said if you do what THEY wanted to do, you would get Z.
The actual result of what THEY wanted to do is Z.
WE were right, THEY were wrong. THEY are crumbums. VOTE FOR US!
I like that style of argument.
Edited for multiple typos of every description.
Corner Stone
@Hill Dweller: This is getting tedious.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/opinion/13krugman.html?_r=1
jl
And the follow up, after you win the election enough to get something done is to say:
We propose to do the best policy, which we say will produce A plus results. We have demonstrated that we know what we are talking about. They demonstrated that they do not.
Let’s do the best policy and get A, not F, or Y or Z or any other nasty crud.
jl
@Valdivia:
I don’t think so. Obama wanted a stimulus, I want people to understand why it worked despite Obama being too timid. That is not the same thing as saying Obama failed or pursued mistaken policies.
If Obama decides to ask for another stimulus, I would back him one thousand percent. Not that anyone would care, but I would.
I am not criticizing trying and missing the ideal.
Martin
@jl:
The next election was 2010 where the electorate determined decisively that the stimulus too big, the deficit as well. They were wrong, but “told you so” wouldn’t have yielded a better outcome.
ReflectedSky
He wasn’t right. He was less wrong than the opposition. He had people in his administration telling him he had to push for a much bigger stimulus, but he listened the the “centrist” old hands who said not to. I recognize some of that was political calculation. But one of his problems was that he was way too interested in “pragmatism” that happened to make him comfortable because it suited his temperament and inclination, as well as allowing him to align himself with VSP instead of dirty hippies.
He could have played the first year of his administration very differently, possibly delivered more effective outcomes (that, yes, would have been progressive) and would have AT LEAST set up a competing narrative and message that would be very, very useful now.
No, he’s not an utter boob. But governance is not a toggle. It’s not just good/bad.
Hill Dweller
@Corner Stone: Yes, I’m well aware of Paul Krugman’s prescience. But he was one voice(granted, a highly respectable voice) among hundreds arguing a different policy. Moreover, there were virtually no economists on TV during the stimulus debate. Media Matters ably documented that in real time.
But the biggest obstacle to getting a bigger stimulus was the Republican filibuster. It gave all the power to the centrists in the Senate, who were being swayed by the politics, as opposed to the economics. And they used said power to arbitrarily reduce its size.
No one is suggesting the stimulus was ideal, but it has to be viewed in the context of the political environment.
jl
@Martin:
I may be wrong, but I do not see how the fact that he did NOT follow the policy I recommended and the next election results were bad is evidence that I am wrong.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
Sorry
Frankensteinbeck
@Corner Stone:
Oddly, I do not find that your article supports your argument. Krugman thought that the stimulus was not big enough. Given that it averted a repeat of the Great Depression, it could be argued that he was wrong. ‘Big enough’ is a value judgment in any case. He implies another stimulus is unlikely to happen, but he does not assert your point that the loss of the 2010 elections or the contraction of state governments was predicted at the time. He certainly argues that Obama could have gotten a bigger stimulus if he was ‘stronger’, but since this is not his area of expertise and he is talking out of his ass here, I don’t see why that’s relevant.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
I don’t know how that happened. I got the whole page in my comment somehow. Anyway, what I said was that Peace Nobels are not usually Lifetime Achievement Awards like a lot of science Nobels are. They’re usually on the order of: “We like what you’re doing, keep it up. Maybe this will help.” Remember Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho?
JoeShabadoo
@MikeJ:
This is all after the fact. Looking back it is easy to see if something was a good idea, they bought into the shitty and faulty predictions.
General Stuck
thank you Dougj. I am glad the deep thinking front pagers of BJ, have finally addressed the issue of the runty stimulus. It’s about fucking time.
rivet
Corner Stone
@Frankensteinbeck: Jesus on a cracker. He stated numerous times that the states would run out of money and be forced to cut employment. I’m sorry you’re so sheltered.
This is fucking boring doing this again and again.
ruemara
@Corner Stone: What, exactly, is your point? You would prefer he went bigger, got kaboshed, no stimulus instead of the smaller stim that passed? Do you understand that things do not just pop up for a vote? You keep carping on the whole “He should have asked for more” yet there’s not a shred of evidence to back up your position that the number requested was the first idea out of the gate. These things go through committee after a round of discussion on what is likely to happen with your caucus. The number put forth has a lot more backroom give and take than your viewpoint seems willing to accept. Frankly, I’d rather there was some stimulus spent on the economy, than the fat nothingburger your approach would guarantee.
Corner Stone
@ruemara: My point is pretty simple, simple.
El Cid
@Frankensteinbeck:
No, this is something which would have to be contextually determined only given a person’s notions of what would be a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ policy, using whatever rules a person generates to determine that.
Otherwise, even given the sort of context you mention, how would you know — whether observer or participant — whether any particular policy aspect is something you desire, oppose, desire more, desire less, and so forth?
The Blue Dog opposition can only be understood as a limit when there is a notion of preferred policy at work in the first place.
Else, how would you even know whether the expressed Blue Dog limits are helpful or harmful? Without some notion of how to determine the desirability of various policy aims and likely outcomes, why wouldn’t someone assume that by placing a limit upon the overall dollar value of the stimulus it prevented jobs from being destroyed?
Of course it is entirely reasonable to argue that the maximum dollar value “size” of economic stimulus (as one bill, it’s argued that other subsequent actions, whether laws or administration actions, should be counted also as stimulus) was reached.
But without an idea of what a differently “sized” program would do and its likely desirable or undesirable effects, how would one decide that this was a good size, or too large, or too small, or that some varying size might be irrelevant?
If you were given only economic / labor etc data about the U.S. at that time period, and had no knowledge of and no access to information about the political situation, would you have no way to outline what policies might be helpful?
If not, then how would you determine what sorts of policies you preferred once you did know a political context? Does the presence or absence of political support or blockage determine whether or not a certain program creates more or fewer jobs?
If so, one would have a very strong incentive to assume that there’s some other variable or activity affecting the job output of some certain program, because it obviously wouldn’t be the direct result of policy.
If all policy preferences are to be expressed within the limits of very specific political and legislative contexts, how is anyone to make any argument for or against a desired policy for the future?
Without the legislative context of each and every particular moment, how could you possibly know what you might prefer? How would you think about a future situation to be worked toward, in, say, 5 or 10 or 20 years?
None of these limitations apply to the actual policy origins of major programs like Social Security. These policies were the subject of research, argument, debate, organizing, lobbying, and public relations long before there even was an immediate legislative context.
There is a real world, and it imposes limits. Some of those limits are very firm and clearly defined, some of them are much less defined and firmness is harder or even impossible to measure.
People directly involved in legislation or lobbying or advocacy or some such do indeed have to take as much of the relevant context into account as they can, as best as they can assess it.
But such context is utterly undefined and meaningless if there exist no ways of analyzing policies in terms of aims and outcomes and preferred goals and methods.
Else, how do you know what it is you wanted to do in the first place? And how do you convince others that they should want that too?
David Fud
After reading critiques of neoclassical economics lately, I’m thinking that Obama simply doesn’t have the Keynesian advisers he needs. Neoclassical economists think that crashes and discontinuities in the markets and in the economy are simply anomalies, not part of the way the system is. Equilibrium is not real most markets, yet the overwhelming majority of economists assume that is the case (among many other foolish assumptions). If you are interested in more critiques of neoclassical economics, google Steve Keen.
ruemara
@Corner Stone: And that relates to anything I said, how? Calling me simple is hardly going to prove that you’re right, just that you’re a dick.
jl
@David Fud:
Not for Keynesians. They do not believe that equilibrium holds all the time, or that crashes and discontinuities are just anomalies produced by exogenous shocks. In order to speak the same language as neoclassical people, and to use the same models, they adjust the models and interpret the model’s equilibrium differently than neoclassical equilibrium macroeconomists do.
Corner Stone
@ruemara: Because you don’t give a shit. That’s why.
It wasn’t one thing or nothing. That’s not politics. That’s apologia bullshit.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@General Stuck: So, you’ve decided to start imitating eemom full-time now?
General Stuck
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
I might. If I want to. Or, maybe I’ll just play checkers with your dumbass.
Mike G
Or, like Cheney/Bush, incompetent and ignorant.
mainmati
@Hill Dweller: The thing about the Blue Dogs is that they think being Conservative will help them. Usually, the swing district voter wants to see someone with a distinctive POV and not a pale, republican Lite version of a Democratic Senator. This is what Webb never understood. He was a conservative Democrat in a very swinger state and he was basically a one-note guy. Too bad because he is a really smart guy otherwise.
mainmati
@Hill Dweller: The thing about the Blue Dogs is that they think being Conservative will help them. Usually, the swing district voter wants to see someone with a distinctive POV and not a pale, republican Lite version of a Democratic Senator. This is what Webb never understood. He was a conservative Democrat in a very swinger state and he was basically a one-note guy. Too bad because he is a really smart guy otherwise.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@General Stuck: That doesn’t make any sense.
berick
He wasn’t competent or right. That would have been: asking for a much larger stimulus immediately, complaining about Republican obstruction and economic sabotage when it was negotiated down, not making so much of it a less-effective tax cut, not promising a specific unemployment level and date to reach it, warning that another stimulus might be necessary, then publicizing the benefits of the stimulus he got. Obama focuses too much on compromise as a goal itself, giving away the game before he even steps to the plate. Yes, he got some stimulus, and was not the absolute idiot the Bush was or McCain probably would have been, but batting .150 isn’t competent.
berick
Oh, and he turned to “Deficit” fear mongering, Republican validating, and Grand bargaining. He walked off the field when he was already behind and let the other team keep batting.
Barry
@Rando: “Isn’t the 27% who have three years of results to look over and still can’t make up their minds the true crazification fraction?”
Judging by Chicago, the true crazification factor in economics is well over 12%, at least in the elite levels.