Y'know, for what it's worth, I think that this public airing of differences between Obama and the Democratic Congress is a good thing overall, despite the usual media snarksters trying to re-cast it as weakness. First, as Krugman and others have pointed out, the Obama team's initial recovery package, while nominally massive, seems somewhat tepid: A measured half-step of jobs programs and tax cuts which seemingly aimed at drawing bipartisan support from both sides of the aisle. While Obamas's no doubt done the calculus and has figured out what proposals he needs to float to get his 60 theoretical Senate votes, it's healthy for Democratic Senators---and particularly folks like Kent Conrad, who's as skilled a number-cruncher as there is in the upper house---to push for Obama to aim higher: the truly skilled operator, after all, is the one who asks for two loaves when he only really wants one, and eventually "settles" for half in a spirit of bipartisanship. Obama has seemingly taken the other tack, and while his political skills so far have been uncannily good, it's probably going to take a little while to learn that the politics of governing are significantly different than the politics of campaigning.
Second, the tax cuts. I never honestly believed Obama gave a rat's ass about this issue during the campaign, that he was only mouthing the usual I'll-do-it-cheaper homilies that every candidate for President since Reagan has been required to utter as a means of gaining voter approval. If he genuinely believes it will make much difference to the health of the economy . . . well, we already know he's not that stupid. So if he's floating the tax cuts to get Republican votes, the pushback he's getting from his former Senate colleagues can be a valuable learning experience for him. At this point in the game, with his 80-percent approval ratings, he doesn't need to be offering up concessions to the GOP; they need to be offering concessions to him. Again, the exercise of power is an entirely thing than the will to power, so it's good to see the old-timers like Conrad and Tom Harkin reminding Obama about this, in their own indirect fashion.
It is also time to remind Obama that he enters the White House with the biggest electoral mandate of any President since Reagan, and for that reason, he needs to start flexing some major muscle the way the Gipper's team did right out of the gate. Now is the time for him to lay out his agenda, take his case to the voters and crank up the heat on the Republicans---not spending anguished hours burning midnight oil crafting thoughtful, filibuster-proof legislation that will almost certainly be filibustered by GOP senators who smell blood in the water.
(And, in a tangentially related note to the Reagan mandate, I can think of one sweet symbolic gesture Obama could make: invite some folks from this group to join him at the White House the first time he sits down for a policy meeting with his new Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis.
Finally, if there's anything we've learned over the last 30 years, absent a surplus economy, tax cuts are simply a lousy idea. They create no new jobs or economic growth by themselves, and that's never been their intent. All they do, and have ever done, is to transfer wealth from the public sector to the private. The only question has ever been, which class of workers gets the biggest bag of cash. I'm not the most devout Nancy Pelosi fan, but count me in with her on this one---the Bush tax cuts need to expire, and the sooner, the better. There are other ways to expand the safety net of the unemployed besides a check for $500 each April.
---Vitelius
Comments