Buyer’s remorse March 4 2009
Some notable Obama supporters have taken off the rose colored glasses:
Here’s Maureen Dowd in yesterday’s New York Times:
In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.
He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.
“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.
He reckons he’ll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like health care, and when he goes back to wheedle more bailout billions, given that A.I.G. and G.M. and our other corporate protectorates are burning through our money faster than we can print it and borrow it from the ever-more-alarmed Chinese.
Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork. Obama spinners insist it was “a leftover budget.” But Iraq was leftover, too, and the president’s trying to end that. This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut pork.
On “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, dismissed the bill as “last year’s business,” because most of it was written last year.
But given how angry Americans are, watching their future go up in smoke, the bloated bill counts as this year’s business.
Here’s David Gergen on AC360 (Anderson Cooper’s blog) yesterday:
So, the argument comes from the White House, damn the torpedoes – full speed ahead!
Yet… yet… yet: It isn’t popular to say right now but there is growing reason to question whether this is the wisest course in terms of our most urgent and pressing challenge: a collapsing world economy. News on the economic front has to be sobering to even the most optimistic among us. Last Friday, we learned that the economy contracted in the 4th quarter by over 6 percent. Over the weekend, Warren Buffett warned that the economy would be in a “shambles” through 2009 and possibly beyond. On Monday, the government issued its fourth bailout for AIG, European ministers rejected a general bailout for Eastern Europe, and the Dow sank below 7,000 – down some 25% since its run-up in January. This Friday economists expect the latest U.S. unemployment numbers to be dismal. Already, the administration’s optimistic economic forecasts for next year look way too rosy.
We are in the midst of a global crisis, one that demands an intense focus and daily leadership by the President of the United States. There is no doubt that President Obama is paying close attention: not only is he receiving a daily economic briefing – new at the White House – and in his first three weeks in office, he secured passage of a massive stimulus bill. Give him ample credit. But there is also no doubt that his ambition for reforms in other areas do not allow him to give the economy his full attention. This Thursday, for example, he will hold a health care “summit” at the White House, as he launches a year-long campaign to achieve what no other president has ever done: a complete overhaul of the health care system. He deserves credit for trying, but in the Clinton years, a similar such effort consumed enormous energy and time by the President and most of his domestic team. And this same White House wants to achieve an overhaul of energy as well this year – a project that is similarly massive and time-consuming. In my own experience at the White House stretching back to the early 1970s, a President and his team can be successful in addressing one big major crisis when they apply laser-like focus, but when juggling two, three or four at a time, they usually bungle one – and often more than that.
…they pretend that, because we’re not going to spend $170 billion in Iraq for the next 10 years per year, that we somehow have saved that money. So they’re claiming savings on money we never would have spent anyway.
There’s a whole series of things here, including some revenue bills which I suspect will never come in, which will leave us with a large fiscal hole because the ambitiousness.
Now, my colleague, Paul Krugman, thinks we’re going to wind up with this big fiscal hole and then a VAT, a consumption tax, to fill it in, and that means, at the end of this journey, we haven’t repaired the American system. We’ve transferred to a different sort of political economic system, much closer to Europe.
And that’s why — I don’t know if we’re going there, but that’s why a lot of people I think in the center and on the right are either alarmed or nervous by the dramatic nature of this budget.
H/T to The Corner discussion over the last two days.
Cross posted at Bluftooni
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