Sometimes drama is called for
by digby
I can’t wait to read Noam Scheiber’s book The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery
Scheiber’s narrative is lucid enough so that the reader can begin to question, along with the author, why several mistakes are made more than once, The White House trusts Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley time and again during sensitive negotiations long after he’s demonstrated his bad faith. The deficit fetish culminates in the ghastly 2011 effort by Obama’s new Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, and David Plouffe, his 2008 campaign manager, to increase the president’s credibility with independent voters by positioning him as a budget cutter—not only the “hoariest of Washington’s old saws,” Scheiber says, but an old saw dependent on the fantasy, even after the Tea Party ascendancy, that a deal can be cut with the Republicans.
Yes, well, those are questions for the ages — unless one goes back to the beginning of the administration and sees that they had always wanted to be budget cutters, Grand Bargainers and what not. The problem was that they stuck to their strategies long after it was clear that it wasn’t going to work. This is the down side of “no drama Obama” — the problem with that being perfectly illustrated by Yeselson’s opening graph:
A guy I know told me a story. He had a friend who was working on the 55th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center on that terrible day. When the plane hit the North Tower, everybody in the office understandably got very worried. When the plane hit the South Tower, people were going crazy. But the authorities on the floor—calm, experienced—told them not to panic. The guy’s friend thought to himself, “Fuck this, we’re all going to die,” and raced downstairs, exiting the building right before it collapsed. I thought of that story when reading Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists, about the economic crisis at the start of Obama’s presidency and the administration’s response.
Stay tuned.
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