Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Redux Redux

by digby

As I watch Ben Nelson and Susan Collins on television telling everyone what the vaunted “centrists” dictate is acceptable in the stimulus package, I can’t resist once again re-posting this post I wrote over a year ago. (Sorry, I can’t help myself.)

Just in case anyone’s forgotten or are too young to remember –the former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and current Unity 08 poobah, David Boren, is an egomaniac who stabbed Bill Clinton in the back repeatedly when he was trying to pass his economic plan in 1993. (As did Bob Kerrey and Sam Nunn, among others.) After months of Clinton kissing Boren’s ass and treating him like the perfumed prince he believes he is, Boren went on “Face The Nation” and announced that he just couldn’t support his president.

He had already insisted on getting rid of the proposed BTU tax and wanted a “compromise” that would have dropped all the new taxes on the wealthy and make up the money by capping Medicare and Medicaid and getting rid of Clinton’s planned EITC for the poor. He, like Bob Kerrey and many others, were obsessed with “fixing” social security and other “entitlements” in order to cure the deficit.

But there was one thing he believed in more than anything else:

From The Agenda:

Gore asked, what did Boren want changed in the plan in order to secure his vote?

Like a little list? Boren asked.

Yeah, Gore said.

Boren said he didn’t have little list. Raising the gas tax a nickel or cutting it a nickel or anything like that wouldn’t do it, he said. He had given his list to Moynihan like everybody else in the Finance Committee. It was over and done with, and Boren likened himself to a free agent in baseball. “I have the luxury of standing back here and looking at this,” Boren said. His test would be simple: Would it work? If not, it didn’t serve the national interest.

Gore said he was optimistic for the first time.

Boren shot back. “There’s nothing you can do for me or to me that will influence my decision on this matter.” he added. “I’m going to make it on the basis of what I think is right or wrong.”

Nobody responded for a moment. Clinton then stepped in. Why didn’t Boren think it was in the national interest? he asked.

It wasn’t bipartisan, Boren answered. To be successful in this country it had been demonstrated over and over, an effort had to be bipartisan, Clinton had even said so himself, Boren pointed out. Even most optimists, Boren said, thought they were still not even halfway there.

No Republican voted for the plan. Clinton knew that he would never get any Republicans to vote for a plan to raise taxes on the wealthy after the handful who had done so in 1990 were burned at the stake by the conservative movement. But sure, they would have voted for a “compromise” that raised no taxes, dropped all investment in infrastructure, any help for the poor and capped spending on the sick to cure the deficit. That’s bipartisanship, village-style.

Bob Kerrey eventually agreed to vote for the plan making it a 50-50 tie — which Al Gore broke, passing the plan. (It passed by one vote in the House, as well.)

Right after the vote Kerrey went on the Senate floor said:

“My heart aches with the conclusion that I will vote yes for a bill which challenges Americans too little.

“President Clinton, if you’re watching now, as I suspect you are, I tell you this: I could not and should not cast a vote that brings down the presidency…

“Get back on the high road, Mr President,”Kerrey proclaimed. Taxing the wealthy was simply “political revenge,” he said. “Our fiscal problems exist because of rapid, uncontrolled growth in the programs that primarily benefit the middle class.” Clinton needed to return to the theme of shared sacrifice, he said, and should have said no to the deals and compromises.

And then he went back on his word to Clinton that he wouldn’t demand a bipartisan commission to study how to cut all those middle class “entitlements.”

David Broder loves David Boren and Bob Kerrey and thinks the country is best served by rabid conservative ideologues and preening Democratic narcissists who lay down for Republicans and fight their own president every step of the way if he wants to enact any kind of progressive legislation. That’s called “getting things done.”

If you want to defeat that dynamic, you have to take on the Republicans and win the ideological war. There are always Senators who want to stab their leadership in the back and make themselves feel powerful and there are always radicals and there are always villagers. And there are also true ideological differences among the Americans they represent. You can’t make them all get together and agree. It’s just not the way the system is designed. You have to win the votes of the people and then lead your party to pass your agenda. Making bipartisanship an end in itself is a recipe for failure because it empowers dry sockets like Nelson and Collins and David Broder — people who believe in the Goldlocks theory of politics even in times of enormous challenge and crisis.

The stakes are too high to cater to flat earth Republicans at this point. Here’s Krugman, commenting on David Broder’s belief that Obama should take one from column A and one from column B:

You see, this isn’t a brainstorming session — it’s a collision of fundamentally incompatible world views. If one thing is clear from the stimulus debate, it’s that the two parties have utterly different economic doctrines. Democrats believe in something more or less like standard textbook macroeconomics; Republicans believe in a doctrine under which tax cuts are the universal elixir, and government spending is almost always bad. Obama may be able to get a few Republican Senators to go along with his plan; or he can get a lot of Republican votes by, in effect, becoming a Republican. There is no middle ground

Obama has (finally) been saying something very important the last couple of days and that is that the Republican theories failed. People don’t know what to think right now about economics, but that is the first, vital step toward deprogramming them from thirty years of conservative brainwashing. And it isn’t particularly nice or bipartisan. Fine. Bring it on.

Update: I’m listening to the press conference today and now the reporters are all questioning why Obama would “add to the debt” when he says he’s been left with such a huge debt by the Republicans.

Is economics no longer a required course?

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Who’s He Listening To?

by digby

Greg Sargent over at The Plum line, asks an important question:

…[P]ublications, Newsweek in particular, are asserting that Obama failed because he was too “bipartisan” at the outset, which is not a take you hear often from the Beltway media. Also, the question I’m asking is, Did Obama’s initial failure to draw a sharper contrast with the opposition happen in spite of the D.C. veterans he’s surrounded with who are supposed experts at the Washington power game, or because of them?

Setting aside Michael Hirsh, who both dday and I excerpted, (and whose columns I searched for previous paeans to bipartisanship and didn’t find any) none of the cable gasbags or the village scribblers have any standing to be questioning Obama’s bipartisan strategy. They are the ones who define bipartisan as catering to Republicans. They’ve been doing it for years.

I can prove this by the fact that when George W. Bush seized office under dubious circumstances and without any kind of a popular mandate, they insisted that Democrats cater to his wishes on massive tax cuts telling partisans who disagreed with his agenda to just “get over it.” In 2004 (when George W. Bush won with six million fewer votes than Obama) they giggled over Grover Norquist’s assertion that the Democrats were now neutered farm animals who would be happier now that they’d been tamed.

So, as much as I have railed that post-partisanship is a pipe dream and that while Obama was talented he was not actually capable of retiring human nature, I find the media’s pooh-poohing to be a bit much. They have been orgasmic at the prospect that Obama wouldn’t let the dirty hippies take over and are only disappointed now that the Democrats are getting anything at all. It’s simply not the way things are supposed to work. Their complaints about Obama being too bipartisan, you see, are actually that he failed to capitulate enough to the Republicans, not that he capitulated too much.

As to Greg’s question as to whether or not Obama listened to the veterans, Jane Hamsher has some intriguing insights into the legislative sausage making today. If what she says is true, it means that Rahm was being cleverly Machiavelian and is now trying to deflect the blame for his own bad call.

President Obama has a huge crisis, a Democratic congress, a mandate and the support of a wide swathe of the people. He didn’t need Rahm to pit the Blue Dogs against the Democrats against the Republicans in some sort of abstract kabuki pageant just because he could. There may be a time and a place where such a thing might make sense. But in the first two weeks of the presidency it made things more complicated than was necessary, particularly considering the fact that people have been so indoctrinated in conservative dogma, that even if they want “change” they don’t know what that entails. Once the devil got into the details, it always required Obama to sell it himself with a deft and certain media plan. If Rahm is playing some sort of inside game to make the liberals be the goats and have Obama be the hero in sympathy with the Blue Dogs, it’s the wrong move. The Republicans are already casting the president as weak and this just makes him look weaker.

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Op-Edder In Chief

by dday

Yesterday, Chris Bowers asked: “Which side is Obama on?” I don’t know if he’ll think the President’s op-ed in the Washington Post will clarify things, but I think it’s pretty decent.

What Americans expect from Washington is action that matches the urgency they feel in their daily lives — action that’s swift, bold and wise enough for us to climb out of this crisis.

Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.

That’s why I feel such a sense of urgency about the recovery plan before Congress. With it, we will create or save more than 3 million jobs over the next two years, provide immediate tax relief to 95 percent of American workers, ignite spending by businesses and consumers alike, and take steps to strengthen our country for years to come.

This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending — it’s a strategy for America’s long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education. And it’s a strategy that will be implemented with unprecedented transparency and accountability, so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent.

In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis — the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. They know that we have tried it those ways for too long. And because we have, our health-care costs still rise faster than inflation. Our dependence on foreign oil still threatens our economy and our security. Our children still study in schools that put them at a disadvantage. We’ve seen the tragic consequences when our bridges crumble and our levees fail.

Much of this reads like a speech on the stump – a speech HE OUGHT TO GIVE, by the way, and as soon as possible, and every day until the bill passes, not in Washington but on a barnstorming tour around the country. The media likes pictures to go with the words, and a half-hour of speechifying mean a half-hour less of Pat Buchanan and Bill Bennett. (This is actually kind of starting, by the way – Joe Biden is standing out in front of a train station in Maryland this morning.) As Chuck Todd said yesterday, Democrats feel “that basically Matt Drudge has been the managing editor for deciding which part of the stimulus package gets highlighted”, and that’s basically true except for the “Democrats feel” part. They are gunning for the young President using the familiar “build-him-up-to-tear-him-down” narrative. It’s all a game to them, and the only course of action is to go fully around the filter, taking the message directly to the people, and making the argument.

Obama’s pretty clear on what he considers a priority in the bill.

Now is the time to protect health insurance for the more than 8 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage and to computerize the health-care records of every American within five years, saving billions of dollars and countless lives in the process.

Now is the time to save billions by making 2 million homes and 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient, and to double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy within three years.

Now is the time to give our children every advantage they need to compete by upgrading 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries and labs; by training our teachers in math and science; and by bringing the dream of a college education within reach for millions of Americans.

And now is the time to create the jobs that remake America for the 21st century by rebuilding aging roads, bridges and levees; designing a smart electrical grid; and connecting every corner of the country to the information superhighway.

That makes up the core and well over 80% of the plan, designed to create many jobs across sectors, across demographics and throughout the economy, because the current recession is similarly systemic and broad. It’s not perfect and ought to be improved – some of the Senate amendments have been atrocious, there isn’t nearly enough for transit (despite the Biden train-stop appearance) and way too much for roads and cars, and the pre-compromised business tax cuts aren’t worth being in here. I’m worried that the final bill will be too small, and the axis of Nelson and Collins, who think they’re writing the bill now, need to be fought. But if these core principles are preserved, we have a start. It’s certainly a more rational piece of legislation than the flailing Republicans, now decrying things they’ve previously voted for, could ever muster in eight years.

Obama’s in the arena. More Democrats need to join him, for this reason if nothing else: If they allow the recovery to be hijacked and rendered ineffective, their political futures are bleak.

…also, it appears Obama wants the bill to remain the same size or grow:

Collins, who said she preferred a stimulus package totaling about $650
billion, said Obama made a “very strong pitch to have a bill that is
considerably bigger than what I might like and argued that the economy
is sufficiently troubled that legislation has to be large enough to
have the kind of impact that we all want.” She said she is “committed
to trying to get to a yes vote.”

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Can U Spell “Freudian Slip?”

by tristero

David S. Broder’s unconscious is raging:

For now, however, the Daschle fiasco is the worst embarrassment Obama has suffered since winning the election.

Dear Mr. Broder:

I really don’t think Barack Obama is embarrassed he beat that damn fool McCain and the ignorant, corrupt rightwing lunatic who ran with him. I think he’d be embarrassed if he hadn’t. As would most of the country.

Why do you think Obama should?

Love,

tristero

Blogging The Origin: First Full Rehearsal

by tristero

It’s been busy up here in Oswego, NY as we prepare for the premiere of The Origin , my new piece about Charles Darwin. I don’t have much time right now – I’m teaching four classes today, then have meetings with Bill Morrison, the filmmaker, and Julie Pretzat, the conductor, then a dress rehearsal in the evening – but I did want to post a couple of quick and dirty pictures from my iPhone for you from the first full rehearsal of the entire ensemble. There are so many performers – close to 200, I believe – I couldn’t get them all in one shot! But here’s at least a bit of the orchestra and chorus:

And here’s a quick pic of the awesomely great Balkan music ensemble KITKA rehearsing “The Voyage of the Beagle.”

It’s going to be an amazing performance.

No Need For Mittens

by digby

Please. No More.

Via Avedon

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Making The Argument

by dday

I can’t argue at all with Digby’s post below, and I think Michael Hirsh nailed the dynamic in Washington right now better than anyone.

It seems to me that the Obama team let their foot off of the accelerator. There was a lot of talk during the transition about how economists and elites of all political ideologies knew something major had to be done, and they must have thought they would just coast to a quick victory on this plan. But that’s not what’s happening, as the conservative noise machine forced an argument about small particulars rather than the need to have a massive job creation program as soon as possible to stave off disaster. The bill was pre-compromised and nothing like a Roosevelt-era New Deal but it would be enough to spur job creation, save a lot more jobs that would be eliminated, and face down the abyss of massive job loss and a deflationary spiral. And while ultimately, Republicans may “lose” in that something will be enacted, they will have won because they will preserve the fundamental argument that government spending is negative and suspicious while tax cuts are always positive and righteous. Their goal is to muck up the bill enough to discredit it and make it functionally inoperable, purely for reasons of party and not country.

Of course, at some level, why would Republicans be trying to drive the country off a cliff? Well, not pretty to say, but they see it in their political interests. Yes, the DeMints and Coburns just don’t believe in government at all or have genuinely held if crankish economic views. But a successful Stimulus Bill would be devastating politically for the Republican party. And they know it. If the GOP successfully bottles this up or kills it with a death of a thousand cuts, Democrats will have a good argument amongst themselves that Republicans were responsible for creating the carnage that followed. But the satisfaction will have to be amongst themselves since as a political matter it will be irrelevant. The public will be entirely within its rights to blame Democrats for any failure of government action that happened while Democrats held the White House and sizable majorities in both houses of Congress.

But there’s also a bigger problem here, one that the Obama Administration may not have seen coming, the underlying narrative to government for the last 30 years, one that has sustained through both Republican and Democratic victories. They aren’t just fighting Republicans, they’re fighting an accumulated history.

The great Rick Perlstein has a fascinating article about the late, lamented liberal Wisconsin Democrat William Proxmire, and his role in “shooting Santa Claus” – basically, planting the seed in our collective noggins that government spending is wasteful and unnecessary, that “in fact it will make things worse.” This flies in the face of all reasonable macroeconomic thought, but talk of “porkbarrel projects” and something called the Golden Fleece Awards brought this contradiction into being, gave it power, and unleashed it on America. It’s a ditch out of which we still cannot pull ourselves.

While re-reading old journalism by Tom Geoghegan, I found myself riveted by a piece of his from the New Republic in November of 1972, the same month George McGovern’s landslide loss to Richard Nixon marked a major lurch in the long, slow slide of liberalism away from ideological hegemony. The piece was a profile of Wisconsin senator William Proxmire. Reading it, I began to reflect whether Bill Proxmire wasn’t the most influential politician of the last 40 years—as the grandfather of the Clinton-era Democratic fetish for fiscal austerity.

Proxmire, who left public service in 1989 and died in 2005, may be best remembered—it’s what I remember—for a monthly publicity stunt called the “Golden Fleece Award,” bestowed upon what he would claim was the month’s most wasteful and ridiculous pockets of government spending. The pundits fell in love with the notion’s good-government pretensions, and for all I know the stunt did the nation some good paring the federal budget of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I suspect, though, the exercise was largely a silly waste of time. One of my professors in graduate school won a Golden Fleece award. Senator Proxmire awarded it for a supposed grant to fund her “mountain climbing hobby.” Actually, she’s one of the nation’s most distinguished anthropologists. She has never climbed a mountain in her life, but used her field work among the Sherpas of Nepal to arrive at some of the most incisive theorizing extant on how societies work. Second-guessing the peer-review process of National Science Foundation grants made for nifty headlines. But it was also numbingly reactionary. According to the Wikipedia entry on Proxmire, the prizes sometimes “went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs.” […]

Indeed it’s not hard to imagine how during the high tide of no-one-shoots-santa-claus-ism, things might have become rather decadent. The moral hazard is plain: If spending is good in itself, the door opens to boondoggles. The field was ripe, in other words, for Golden Fleeces.

Enter William Proxmire, filled with liberal good intentions, introducing a new story into the American political culture: We can do better. That the problem wasn’t spending as such, but the misdirection and corruption of spending. Proxmire would quote his hero, the late liberal senator Paul Douglas, chastising their fellow liberals: “Say ‘spend,’ and they salivated.” The source of the quote is significant: Even Paul Douglas,—who, in his days as an an academic economist, had done much the work establishing that it was sound fiscal policy to stimulate consumer spending—understood that things could go too far.

And so we’ve done a complete 180 in this country. Instead of recognizing that federal spending isn’t always virtuous but is part of the overall economy, and vital in an economic trap when consumers and investors aren’t ponying up, we’ve been beaten down by and consumed with far-right rhetoric about pork. So liberals say “we can do better” while conservatives say “we can’t do anything.” And since the middle ground is spending too little to matter, the country suffers in the process.

And, of course—this is where the “Santa Claus” idea transformed itself from a witty little metaphor to literal Republican principle—”conservatives” didn’t cut spending at all. They ballooned it. Here were some contrasts between Reagan and Proxmire: His most useful Golden Fleece awards went to Pentagon expenditures. When Richard Nixon, in the spirit of Republican fiscal responsibility, proposed to lower the federal government’s debt ceiling to $250 billion, Proxmire did him one better, saying it should be only $240 billion. Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush after him, provide the plain contrast: Make the idea of reigning in Pentagon spending anathema, utterly unpatriotic, and ignore responsible debt ceilings altogether. They did away with fiscal responsibility, under cover of the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility, only changing government spending into a channel for private pilfering instead of a function of the public good.

Alack and alas, William Proxmire: like it or not, your “critique of pork barrel Keynesians” greased the skids for this big con. You and your enlightened Dem budget-hawk comrades made the usual mistake: presume good faith on the part of the modern Republican Party. “One of Proxmire’s favorite statistics,” Geoghegan reported in 1972, “compares the rate of return on government investment with the rate of return on private investment. (The public sector falls short by five percentage points.) Rather than spend tax money to reach a social goal, he urges the use of tax policy to the same end.” Sound familiar? Says today’s well-dressed wingnut: tax cuts are the only responsible stimulus. Thought Proxmire: “Neither the Executive nor Congress is organized to make spending ‘cost effective.’ That rankles him.” He convinced a nation. Now, concludes the well-dressed wingnut, government spending is inherently irresponsible. And the well-dressed Democrat half believes he must be right.

This is a story that has put liberals—”responsible” ones, “populist” ones, all of them—into a terrible bind. At this late date, decades since anyone in Washington would admit to believing that any government spending is useful spending, when flesh-and-blood Democrats in the White House like Bill Clinton proved themselves such responsible stewards of the public purse that the federal payroll went down under their watch, Barack Obama wants to do some spending. He wants to do it in a way Proxmire the liberal budget hawk would surely have signed off on: targeted, responsible, scientifically—sophisticated spending, on public-service jobs, spending that starts fast and automatically tapers off as the economy recovers.

And what is his reward? Republicans are able to parade themselves before our supposedly most responsible media commentators and proclaim, “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.”

You have to do more than win an election. You have to win the argument. You have to tell people why your ideas are more worthy of their vote than the opponent’s ideas. It cannot be style, or charisma, or superior resources. Not if you want big change. As Tom Geoghegan said at a chat with LA-area bloggers yesterday, people don’t like taxes because they don’t feel like they get anything for them in return. Instead of blaming those in government siphoning away that money to the rich, they blame the taxes. It’s natural. And it becomes a terrible conditioned response, one that disrupts and distorts progressive change for our whole society.

We have to, in the short term, turn around the flood of calls and fight for this recovery plan. As the months go on, we have to continue to make the arguments, as we have on the blogosphere for years, to our lawmakers, and press them to make those arguments wherever they go. President Obama started this today with a simple statement.

In the past few days, I’ve heard criticisms that this [stimulus] 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.

Especially in the midst of this meltdown, we cannot sit back for a moment while the forces conspiring to maintain the failed status quo push ever forward. Forget about campaigning, this is governing. And while different rules apply, one thing is constant – nobody ever won the battle of ideas without speaking up.

Call your Reps.

Marshalling Their Forces

by digby

In case you were wondering if there aren’t enough assholes out there trying to Harry and Louise this stimulus package, here come the fiscal scolds:

As the Senate debates an economic stimulus plan whose price tag could come close to $900 billion, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation — a non-partisan group created to bring awareness to the nation’s rising spending and entitlement costs — is launching an ad campaign to urge the Obama White House and Congress to address long-term fiscal challenges. That campaign began today with a print advertisement in the Washington Post and Roll Call. “Today’s economic crisis is just the tip of the iceberg,” the ad says, with the picture of a gigantic iceberg. “We must also focus on a much larger yet less visible threat: the $56 trillion in liabilities and unfunded retirement and health care obligations (that’s $483,000 per U.S. household), and the dangerous reliance on foreign lenders, that threaten our ship of state.” Tomorrow, Peterson Foundation president Dave Walker — along with Sens. Kent Conrad (D) and George Voinovich (R), and Reps. Frank Wolf (R) and Jim Cooper (D) — will hold a press conference to announce the group’s full plans for a $1 million-plus advertising campaign.

Ah look, and it’s bipartisan too! Isn’t that great?Considering how incredibly effective the Democrats have been with this stimulus package, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that they’ll be “working with” people who want to destroy whatever tattered safety net we still have. These are the people who really understand the principles of the shock doctrine.
Meanwhile, here’s Michael Hirsh from Newsweek assessing the state of politics two weeks in, and I can’t say that he’s got it wrong, unfortunately:

Barack Obama began making his comeback on Wednesday, apparently aware that he has all but lost control of the agenda in Washington at a time when he simply can’t afford to do so. Obama’s biggest problem isn’t Taxgate—which resulted in the Terrible Tuesday departure of his trusted friend, Tom Daschle, and the defanging of his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. Nor is the No. 1 problem that the president can’t seem to win a single Republican vote for his stimulus package. That’s a symptom, not a cause. The reason Obama is getting so few votes is that he is no longer setting the terms of the debate over how to save the economy. Instead the Republican Party—the one we thought lost the election—is doing that. And the confusion and delay this is causing could realize Obama’s worst fears, turning “crisis into a catastrophe,” as the president said Wednesday.

Obama’s desire to begin a “post-partisan” era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that’s supposed to be “temporary” and “targeted”—among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts requiring immediate spending. Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough. When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There’s no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

But the public isn’t hearing about that all-important distinction right now. And by the time Obama signs a bill—if he can get one approved—many Americans may have concluded that the GOP is right and that the Democrats have embarked on another spending spree, as if this were just another wearying Washington debate. Judging from his flurry of TV appearances Tuesday night and his remarks on Wednesday, Obama himself seems to have realized belatedly that he needs to stop empathizing and take charge. After trying to put the Daschle imbroglio behind him by frankly acknowledging that he, the president, “screwed up,” Obama reminded everyone of the urgency of the moment. “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,” he said at the White House. Obama also sought to regain the moral high ground by announcing he would limit senior executive pay at bailed-out Wall Street firms to $500,000. “We’re taking the air out of the golden parachute,” Obama said, adding that it was only “the beginning of a long term effort to examine the ways in which the means and manner of executive compensation contributed to a reckless culture…” That’s a step in the right direction. But now Obama needs to remind the American people that unless the Republicans get on board, they will bear political responsibility for failing to act in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Proof that that Team Obama and his party are losing the debate can be found in a new poll out Wednesday. The Rasmussen Reports survey found that, even though Obama still has a very high approval rating, only 37 percent of Americans now favor the stimulus legislation, compared to 45 percent two weeks ago. The results were similar to a recent Gallup survey that found just 38 percent of voters now support the recovery plan. Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate minority leader, hinted Wednesday that Obama has lost control of his own Congress. “The president has tried to set some priorities. Unfortunately, Democrats just keep throwing more money on top of an already-bloated bill,” McConnell said on the floor.

[…]

… An administration that two weeks ago set out to change the world, having claimed the first Democratic majority victory in a presidential race since Jimmy Carter, now looks like it’s engaged in a Pickett’s Charge—without the benefit of being led by Pickett. Meanwhile the Senate Dems took off part of Wednesday for a “retreat.”

This is all too leisurely. Speed is of the essence now. No one understands this better than Geithner, whose formative experience as a young Treasury official in Tokyo came in watching Japanese authorities dither and muddle about for a decade after their own giant bubble of an economy collapsed in 1989. “Monetary policy was very slow to respond,” Geithner told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “Fiscal policy was very tentative and then did a lot of zigzagging.” He’s right. Like Geithner, I was working in Tokyo at the time (as a journalist) and watched every one of those zigs and zags. The answer then, as now, was bold leadership. The Japanese didn’t supply it, and they still haven’t fully recovered. What’s the point of historical lessons if you don’t learn from them?

I think the administration thought they could be mediators between the two parties rather than leaders of the Democratic party. That just won’t work, particularly when the Democrats aren’t very good at battling the Republicans in close combat and the Republicans can make those who stay above the fray seem lightweight and insubstantial, which is what they’ve managed to do. They’ve showed they don’t respect Obama and are unimpressed with his mandate — the administration needs to accept that and strategize with that in mind.

He said today that bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake is not desirable. He should just drop that whole schtick. He can have the cocktail parties and the get togethers and talk to them all he wants. And if they happen to have a good idea (very doubtful) then fine. But they are going to represent their narrow interests because that’s what they believe their constituents want. That’s the way the system works. They aren’t partners, they’re political adversaries and they remain adversaries even when there is an emergency at hand. Accept that and fight it out on the merits

Update: The president uses the bully pulpit and writes an op-ed in Washington Post. Good for him.

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Class Warfare

by digby

Mort Zuckerman just said on MSNBC that they should put an overall cap on all financial firm salaries instead of the top executives because these firms will lose all the important talent who will go with other companies which aren’t regulated (and presumably ruin them too.) What he conveniently neglects to note is that if the “overall cap” is put in place in order to keep these valuable and obscenely overpaid executives on board, the middle and lower paid workers will have to be the ones to take a pay cut. Isn’t that a great idea?

I really don’t think these failed executives are going to find a lot of takers for their dubious talents. The entire economy is severely contracting and I doubt there’s any company out there that is anxious to deal with angry shareholders about hiring some former wall street or banking titan who requires that he be paid millions of dollars each year. But let them have at it. The taxpayers don’t need to be on the hook for their dubious services.

And I would actually bet that there are plenty of talented executives out there who would be happy to take on the job for a half a million dollars a year and shares of the new, revived institution. (Especially if the government guarantees shareholders, in which case we’re all being had.) Some of them might even do it out of patriotic duty — or at least in the knowledge that saving the financial system is imperative if they ever want to make big money in the future. They can’t all be short-sighted, Randian morons.

Can they?

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Shouting Down The Wingnuts

by digby

Wingnut radio has gone completely nuts, apparently, and they have their dittoheads calling the Senate to complain about the recovery plan.

So, because the democrats are now going wobbly, we need to call them and tell them to do their duty. (sigh….)

CAF has made that easy for us:

Progressives need to pick up the phone NOW to counter the onslaught of conservative calls to Congress, and push the Senate to fight for a bold economic recovery bill that creates jobs and counters the recession.

Here are 3 simple steps to guide your calls…

Step 1) Dial 1-866-544-7573. You will be given brief instructions (which you can skip by pressing “1”) then forwarded to the Congressional switchboard operator. Tell the operator which state you’re from, and ask to be connected to one of your senators.

Step 2) Tell Your Senators: Pass a bold economic recovery bill that puts America back to work. Here are some talking points to help guide your call.

* I urge you to pass a big and bold economic recovery bill that puts priority on getting Americans back to work and ending the recession.

* Please resist attempts to weaken the bill with more corporate tax breaks and cuts in public investment.

* My community would benefit greatly from investments in infrastructure, green jobs, education, health care, unemployment assistance and state government aid.

(For more background information and talking points, please click here.)

Step 3) Tell us how your calls went. Report back to us so that we know where we’ve got Senate support and where pressure is still needed.

This is the kind of thing they are doing to get their zombies to march:

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint tells The Brody File that a newly discovered controversial provision in President Obama’s stimulus plan is, “an attack on people of faith” … The Brody File contacted the Senator and he gave us the following response:

“Democrats are looking for every opportunity to purge faith and prayer from the public square. This will empower the ACLU with ambiguous laws that create liability for schools, universities, and student organizations. This is an attack on people of faith and I don’t think Americans will stand for it.” – Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina)

DeMint’s spokesman Wesley Denton says, “This is an ACLU stimulus, because any school that gets funds to upgrade a student center or building where Bible studies or religious meetings may be held will be slapped with a lawsuit. This bill declares a war on prayer at college campuses in this country. Students have [a] constitutional right to use public facilities regardless of their religious views, and President Obama needs to step in to ask Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi to stop this attack on students of faith.”

That is a complete lie, of course, which Kyle at Right Wing Watch explains at the link.

One of the things I’ve hammered over the past few years in my writing about how the right wing works, it the fact that they rarely go for broke with one big coordinated hissy fit (although they do that at times.) It’s more like the death of thousand small hissy fits. They build an “impression” of corruption, incompetence, weakness etc over time with many small and medium sized “controversies”. By now, the villagers (and probably many in the public) are so attuned to this that they just absorb the impression and regurgitate it without even knowing they are doing it.

Witness Ms MoDo today, writing a column that was so predictable I’m sorry there isn’t a Dowd book in Vegas so I could get rich:

Mr. Obama’s errors on the helter-skelter stimulus package were also self-induced. He should put down those Lincoln books and order “Dave” from Netflix.

When Kevin Kline becomes an accidental president, he summons his personal accountant, Murray Blum, to the White House to cut millions in silly programs out of the federal budget so he can give money to the homeless.

“Who does these books?” Blum says with disgust, red-penciling an ad campaign to boost consumers’ confidence in cars they’d already bought. “If I ran my office this way, I’d be out of business.”

Mr. Obama should have taken a red pencil to the $819 billion stimulus bill and slashed all the provisions that looked like caricatures of Democratic drunken-sailor spending.

As Senator Kit Bond, a Republican, put it, there were so many good targets that he felt “like a mosquito in a nudist colony.” He was especially worried about the provision requiring the steel and iron for infrastructure construction to be American-made, and by the time the chastened president talked to Chris Wallace on Fox Tuesday, he agreed that “we can’t send a protectionist message.”

Mr. Obama protested to Brian Williams that the programs denounced as “wasteful” by Republicans “amount to less than 1 percent of the entire package.” All the more reason to cut them and create a lean, clean bill tailored to creating jobs.

Somebody needs to tell Dowd that Dave is a fantasy and so are Republican talking points. (Do read the entire column to see the sheer scope of her incoherence. By the end, she seems to be blaming Obama for executive jets because he hired Tom Daschle.)

Take a few minutes and call your senators, even the liberals, and tell them that you want them to vote for the stimulus. I can’t believe we have to whip a Democratic senate with 58 goddamned votes, but apparently we do.

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