Obama Keeping His Powder Dry…cuz, you know…dry power is teh awesome!
Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com says…
The Paradox of Political Capital
If the Washington Post is correct that the stimulus bill is going to be significantly pared down in the Senate — possibly deducting about $200 billion from its total and making the ratio of spending programs to tax cuts closer to 1:1 — this will be viewed as a moral victory for the Republicans. I think that’s a fair assessment. The President remains very popular and the stimulus bill started out that way too, although we can debate how popular it remains now. And yet — with the important caveat that there are many more chapters to be written in this saga — the final bill is likely to come out looking closer to what the Greg Mankiw‘s of the world might have advocated for and less the Paul Krugman’s.
Perhaps it was inevitable that this would happen once the details of the bill became known and the Republicans began to pick over them like vultures. Perhaps the bill could have been better written. Still, in essentially passing off both narrative and literal control of the contents of the package to the Congressional Democrats, the Obama administration may have played it too cute by half. Obama is popular; Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid aren’t. The trajectory of the bill might have been different if Obama had devoted a prime time speech toward selling it, with graphs and pie charts and the like. But there hasn’t been a Big Obama Moment like that — a show of force — something that really resonated outside the Beltway. The closest Obama came, oddly enough, was during his inaugural address, but the references to the stimulus there were abstract, oblique.
The upside is that Obama himself is likely to emerge from the whole affair relatively unscathed. This might count as a victory for the Republicans on K Street — but less so on main street, which has not been sweating all the details, and will still see a very large bill passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the White House. This brings us, however, to the conundrum mentioned in the title. If Obama is not ready to use his political capital for fear that he’ll lose it, then what good does it do him in the first place?
Perhaps it was inevitable that this would happen once the details of the bill became known and the Republicans began to pick over them like vultures.
Pardon my pie in the sky ideals, but shouldn’t all members of Congress pick over the details of bills they vote on?
I mean, that’s what they are there for, right?
There is picking and there is spreading bullshit lies and distortions, but hey – it’s all good.
I love dry power. The Dems power is so dry after eight years of Bush that it is drier than dry. I need to go get a glass of water because I’m parched just thinking about how freaking dry our Dem powder is.
It puts all other dry powder to shame.
I see what you’re saying, but it looks like this bill doesn’t have the votes.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/03/AR2009020304024.html
Now, here’s my politically focused question… if this bill doesn’t get passed and the economy gets worse, whose powder ends up wet?
Or if a watered down version passes, but doesn’t help…
Obama gets the blame either way.
If is passes he is a schmuck for giving away too much, if it fails he is a schmuck for buying sod for the national mall.
Why Dems allow themselves to be put in these lose/lose situations is beyond me. Republicans admit that they want hi to fail and yet we chace this fantasy of bi-partisanship at any cost.
I think some blame goes to the crazy Democrats who don’t demand a real filibuster from Republicans. I want Mitch McConnell up there reading from the phone book, damn it!
I’m not so sure about that, J.
I’d say the powder keg has already burned up for stimulus fear-monger mania :
“Support for Stimulus Package Falls to 37%
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Support for the economic recovery plan working its way through Congress has fallen again this week. For the first time, a plurality of voters nationwide oppose the $800-billion-plus plan.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 37% favor the legislation, 43% are opposed, and 20% are not sure.
Two weeks ago, 45% supported the plan. Last week, 42% supported it.
Opposition has grown from 34% two weeks ago to 39% last week and 43% today.”
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/economic_stimulus_package/support_for_stimulus_package_falls_to_37
TPN,
Not surprised given the GOP’s message discipline.
Obama needs to realize that the radical Republicans are playing for keeps.
Republicans are rolling the dice. If they succeed in killing this bill – or boasting about changing it to their way of thinking – they will own the outcome.
It’s not just the GOP, though. The pro-stimulus numbers are approaching Bush levels (e.g. 32%ers, 25%ers, and down from there).
Obama was a fool to put his fate in Pelosi’s hands like this, from jump street. The public is in no mood for the worn-out game of Democrat special interest deficit-exploding bonanzas (any more than for the Republican version of it).
Obama should just pull the plug and try to start over, without the rush and the fear-mongering and Patriot Acting. Digging in against popular opposition is Bush playbook and we know where that gets you.
And I guess the radical repub message now includes being in denial that there is a financial crisis in the first place. Which I guess makes sense when you badly need to make sure that no one remembers how we got here in the first place.
If there is one thing I would ask Obama to do would be to get Dems to flood the media zone to talk about this thing. So far, all you hear are the lies and distortions of the Rs, which leads you to the idiocy of the myth of sod on the Mall.
Obama did speak today re: the recovery package:
OBAMA: Thank you, Tim, for your hard work on this issue and on the economic recovery. The economic crisis we face is unlike any we’ve seen in our lifetime. It’s a crisis of falling confidence, and rising debt, and widely distributed risk, and narrowly concentrated reward, a crisis written in the fine print of subprime mortgages, on the ledger lines of once-mighty financial institutions, and on the pink slips that have upended the lives of so many people across this country and cost the economy 2.6 million jobs last year alone.
We know that, even if we do everything that we should, this crisis was years in the making and will take more than weeks or months to turn things around.
OBAMA: But make no mistake: A failure to act and act now will turn crisis into a catastrophe and guarantee a longer recession, a less robust recovery, and a more uncertain future. Millions more jobs will be lost; more businesses will be shuttered; more dreams will be deferred.
And that’s why I feel such a sense of urgency about the economic Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that is before Congress today. With it, we can save or create more than 3 million jobs, doing things that will strengthen our country for years to come.
It’s not merely a prescription for short-term spending. It’s a strategy for long-term economic growth in areas like renewable energy and health care and education.
Now, in the past few days, I’ve heard criticisms that this plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care, that we can somehow deal with this in a piecemeal fashion and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.
I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. …
What don’t you get about the simple notion that the financial crisis is not going to be addressed by massive government deficit-borrowing and pork-barrel? I know you disagree, but this is hardly denying there is a problem.
“Catastrophe”? Oh great goshomighty, run for the hills!!
Fear-monger away, Obama. (I’d think Bush and Rove have to be somewhere laughing it up at how amateurish is Obama’s fear-mongering. But at least he is trying.)
Tyler, what is your solution? People are losing their jobs, homes, health insurance, etc. They can’t get credit to buy items that could stimulate the economy. We’re not only frozen – we’re falling.
How do you address these problems?
And the Bush fear-mongering was based on something that might happen again. This catastrophe is happening now.
Pandora – I disagree with your premise, that there has to be a “solution”, especially a trillion dollar one jammed through Congress in a matter of days.
Even Obama claims there is no ‘magic bullet’.
Mind-boggling Federal deficit spending will not only worsen the economic weakness but actually make it permanent. I guess this where we fundamentally disagree.
If I have an immediate “solution” to hard times it is to ensure the basic social safety net (food, shelter) and keep the goddamn big government agenda out of the equation.
“Sacrifice” ain’t about pretending we can just swoop in and fix things from on high, with money from thin air. Who the hell does anyone think is going to buy all this debt?
Not that Senator MBNA helped, but bankruptcies and reorganizations are ultimately routes to financial health. Though it has been painted as stigmatic and taboo for people to go this route, in the end it is largely many rapacious creditors left holding the bag. Good, I say.
Let them take their lumps, both directly and indirectly.
The “solution” I see proposed with this runaway Economic Patriot Act of 2009 is anything but a matter of “hard choices” by the party in power.
Hard choices would be admitting there is only so much we can do, and that if we do TOO MUCH with orgasmic stimulation now now now and worry about paying for it later, we risk severely damaging the full faith and credit of our government itself.
I am the first to admit I don’t have the answers or “the solution”, but then I am not pretending I do, much less asking someone else to pay for it.
Tyler,
What part of borrowing capital to increase your return over the cost of that capital don’t you get? Businesses borrow all the time when they can increase revenue over the cost of borrowing (that’s called profit).
And so does the government. And it is a good thing if the government can increase GDP over the cost of borrowing.
The idea here is to borrow at least enough to keep the GDP from falling into a death spiral – is that worth borrowing for? I think so. If the GDP goes into a death spiral, frankly, all bets are off as to the survival of the United States.
Now I’m not an economist (duh) but it seems to me that your philosophy is better suited on a small scale. How many bankruptcies can this country realistically handle?
By the way, Tyler, coming from you, your statement “‘immediate “solution’ to hard times it is to ensure the basic social safety net (food, shelter)” is simply shallow when repubs and libertarians have been all about destroying the safety net.
Who is going to pay for that? Your so-called “safety net” is already in shreds.
Cassandra is right I am also tired of seeing these wingnuts on TV where is our side????
I have one problem with this Bill it’s to Small should be twice the size.
Also let the banks fail it can’t be any worst.
why is truthteller like the last person to comment?
D it’s because I am in Califorina and You are 3 hours ahead of me
Hey A1, name me one.. ONE libertarian, and what he has done to destroy the safety net.
It’s hard to place blame on a party that has zero people in the three branches of the federal government.
McConnell would need to read from the phonebook just the bill. It is almost as thick and would sink the bill. (comment 5)
Already the GOP has closed most of the generic ballot gap. The reason President Obama can’t pull out the pie charts is that his opponents bill would work better according to his own models.
If you want real stimulus follow this plan…http://stoptaxing.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/root-causes/
Brian,
Do you read your own party’s positions?
Libertarians are against the government paying for ANY KIND of social safety net, including health care, welfare, social security, and unemployment.
http://www.lp.org/platform
My statement wasn’t that individual Libertarians have destroyed the “safety net.” My statement that “repubs and libertarians have been all about destroying the safety net.” is absolutely true. It is a fundamental Libertarians goal. Thank goodness your party has never been in power.
For Tyler, as a Libertarian, to call for some kind of government “safety net” is disingenuous and cruel as it shows a fundamental ignorance of how badly shredded the “safety net” in our state and country has become.