Obama's inside-out view of the public option

Subscribe to xpostfactoid

I have been slowly working my way through Obama's memoir with a kind of wariness of being emotionally sucked in. Like all political memoirists, Obama presents himself as having made the best decisions he could given what he knew at the time. True, in the sense that his motives were good, his process was good, and his intellect is good. But still self-serving, and sometimes disingenuous.  

For all Obama's solicitation of a wide range of views, his narrative presents the predominance of certain views and voices as a given.  For example, regarding the size of the stimulus, Obama recounts this mid-December exchange:

Immediately after the election, examining the worsening data, we had raised the number to $500 billion. The team now recommended something even bigger. Christy mentioned a trillion dollars, causing Rahm to sputter like a cartoon character spitting out a bad meal. “There’s no fucking way,” Rahm said. Given the public’s anger over the hundreds of billions of dollars already spent on the bank bailout, he said, any number that began “with a t” would be a nonstarter with lots of Democrats, not to mention Republicans. I turned to Joe, who nodded in assent.

And that's it: political reality foreclosed, while Larry Summers foreclosed on the economic argument for more stimulus-- and Christine Romer's input is reduced to a "mention."  In Obama's telling, the stimulus his administration proposed was audaciously gargantuan by any current standard. 

The name of the game is the finger game...

The Times has an A1 story coming out tomorrow about "fingers pointing" at David Axelrod for the President's perceived communications failures. I guess we've turned the page from the clutch of stories blaming Rahm Emanuel for the alleged failure to maintain Camelot, which in its turn succeeded roughly a year's worth of stories blaming Timothy Geithner.


This predictable sequence reminds me of a dimly remembered shock from early childhood. In an afterschool program for (I think, roughly) 5 year olds, our little group generally had one member designated, whether by common consent or the acclamation of a self-appointed opinion leader or two, "the dummy."  I seem to recall accepting it as part of the natural order of things that someone held this honorific, and that it wasn't me. Until the day when a beefy loudmouth announced to a standing circle, "X isn't the dummy any more!" He pointed at me. "He is! In soccer, before you can throw the ball in bounds, he's kicked it out of bounds!"

My memory is that this charge was completely fabricated (or imagined). Whether I vigorously defended myself, stood gaping in stunned silence, or managed something in between I can't recall. I'm pretty sure that the title didn't stick for more than a minute or two. I wish I could say that I'd stood up for a prior or subsequent designated dummy, but I can't recall that either.  All I know is that the story comes to mind whenever the scapegoating finger makes its mindless progress through a series of public figures.

As for the administration's alleged failures of communication, strategy and policy: of course there are many. At the same time, the unemployment rate is 9.7% and the President's approval rating hovers at 50%. Reagan's approval rating at the one year mark was essentially identical -- 49% -- after a year in which unemployment had climbed from 7.5% to 8.5%  By December 1982, unemployment had spiked to 10.8% and Reagan hit his polling nadir, 35%.  Bottom line: the administration's "failures" as assessed by public opinion are almost entirely a function of the economy Obama inherited. That will not be true forever, but it's true now. And luck will play a large part in future fluctuations -- if not, ultimately, in his performance over the long haul, and future generations' perceptions of it.

Talking points m.o.

Remember this from John Boehner and Eric Cantor, in a letter to Rahm Emanuel dated Feb. 8?

If the President intends to present any kind of legislative proposal at this discussion, will he make it available to members of Congress and the American people at least 72 hours beforehand?Our ability to move forward in a bipartisan way through this discussion rests on openness and transparency.

 Different times, different circumstances, I guess, today:

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) criticized the White House's plan to post a health care reform proposal online, just days before the upcoming health care summit. "You know, apparently we're going to be there most of the day and have an opportunity to have a lot of discussion," said McConnell. "But if they're going lay out the plan they want to pass four days in advance, then why are -- what are we discussing on Thursday?"

I realize that these guys are, technically, different people. But a party line is a party line, especially if you're a Republican. They need to get their (bull)shit together.

Related posts:
Calling Boehner Cantor et al
The earth beneath their feet: Obama recasts health care reform
Aghanistan redux: Obama's HCR surge
Obama picks "none of the above" again
A gallon of water at bedtime for bedwetters: Obama's HCR prescription
How Obama will -- and won't -- lead on health care

The earth beneath their feet: Obama recasts health care reform

Reading the Obama Administration's letter setting out the terms of the Feb. 25 health care summit, it struck me that the obvious has crept up on us by inches. It's this: moving in his own deliberate fashion, President Obama has doubled down on health care reform.  Rather than gather his Democratic flock in the immediate aftermath of the Massachusetts debacle, he has moved the political ground beneath them as well as the Republicans.  He has issued a put-up-or-shut-up to the whole Congress. Of course, he knows that only the Democrats have something to put up. But he is going to make them put it up -- even if they vote it down. 

Look at how the work order, so to speak, is framed (the letter is under the signature of Rahm Emanuel and Kathleen Sebelius):

We have seen again in recent days that when it comes to health care, the status quo is unsustainable and unacceptable. The proof is right in front of us: just last week, a major insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, announced plans to increase premiums for many of its policyholders in California by as much as 39 percent on March 1.

As the President noted this week, if we don’t act on comprehensive health insurance reform, this enormous rate hike will be "just a preview of coming attractions. Premiums will continue to rise for folks with insurance; millions more will lose their coverage altogether; our deficits will continue to grow larger."

Now is the time to act on behalf of the millions of Americans and small businesses who are counting on meaningful health insurance reform. In the last year, there has been an extraordinary effort to craft effective legislation. There have been hundreds of hours of committee hearings and mark-ups in both the House of Representatives and Senate, with nearly all of those sessions televised on C-SPAN. The Senate spent over 160 hours on the Senate floor considering health insurance reform legislation and, for the first time in history, both the House of Representatives and Senate have approved comprehensive health reform legislation. This is the closest our Nation has been to resolving this issue in the nearly 100 years that it has been debated...[snip]

Don't get her wrong

Rahm Emanuel should be flattered that Sarah Palin thinks he should resign. She probably also thinks that he should publish a ghost-written book, get a TV show and run for President.

Obama to Karzai: No marriage, no dowry?

I have noted before that at least since September 20 Obama has been signalling that the ostentatiously public review of Afghan strategy is at least in part an attempt to force a credible outcome -- most likely a unity government between Karzai and Abdullah -- to the fraudulent Afghan election. In his talk show blitz at that time, Obama recast the troop increase he ordered in March as a bid to secure the election and stressed that he had at that time planned a second review in the election's wake.

The point may seem obvious by now - how could the U.S. go all-in to support a government re-seated by an election so fraudulent it insistently recalls the bogus election in Iran? In any case, the linkage was made explicit by a chorus of administration officials and allies this weekend. From the Times' talk show roundup:

WASHINGTON — The White House signaled Sunday that President Obama would postpone any decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan until the disputed election there had been settled and resulted in a government that could work with the United States.

As an audit of Afghanistan’s Aug. 20 election ground toward a conclusion, American officials pressed President Hamid Karzai to accept a runoff vote or share power with his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister. Although Mr. Karzai’s support appeared likely to fall below 50 percent in the final count, together he and Mr. Abdullah received 70 percent, in theory enough to forge a unity government with national credibility.

The question at the heart of the matter, said President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is not “how many troops you send, but do you have a credible Afghan partner for this process that can provide the security and the type of services that the Afghan people need?” He appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

He echoed the thoughts of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a top Obama ally and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who said in a separate interview from Kabul, “I don’t see how President Obama can make a decision about the committing of our additional forces, or even the further fulfillment of our mission that’s here today, without an adequate government in place.” His interview was broadcast on “Face the Nation.”

“It would be irresponsible,” Mr. Emanuel told CNN. Then he continued, paraphrasing the senator, that it would be reckless to decide on the troop level without first doing “a thorough analysis of whether, in fact, there’s an Afghan partner ready to fill that space that U.S. troops would create and become a true partner in governing.”

Looks awfully like no shotgun marriage, no dowry.

UPDATE 10/27: Joe Klein (10/24) also sees Obama's pause as a conscious application of political pressure:

Rahm Emanuel's television appearance last Sunday, in which he said that no decision could be made on more troops until the Afghan government resolved its electoral mess, was part of a coordinated effort to get Karzai to agree to a runoff election. And it worked, but not before a baloney-storm erupted among the wingers, criticizing the President and Emanuel for dithering about sending more troops. As soon as Karzai agreed to the runoff, a second message was sent by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates--plans were proceeding for the next stage of the war. The Emanuel-Gates statements were routinely described as "dueling" and, for a day or so, that's exactly how it seemed: a slight breech between the Pentagon and the White House.

But it wasn't. And Obama's effort to formulate a new strategy for Afghanistan is, by all accounts, a coherent effort to incorporate four information streams--the military situation on the ground (the McChrystal stream); the military situation across the Pakistan border, where a major offensive is taking place that will have an impact on the situation in Afghanistan; the Afghan political stream; and the latest intelligence about the size, strength and intentions of Al Qaeda.

Capitalist redistribution

Every now and then, a short article brings thoughts that have been tugging at the edge of your consciousness into sharp focus In that category is Rob Atkinson's Where did all the wealth go? Eureka #1: devalued assets are still there:

Consider housing. When hurricane Katrina demolished more than 275,000 homes, America was $80 billion poorer. In contrast, after the recent financial hurricane demolished the value of homes, there were 750,000 more homes in America. Current owners will get $2.1 trillion less when they sell and will have to forgo that new car or vacation. But future buyers will save $2.1 trillion and that new car or vacation will go to them, rather than the seller...

Just like housing market, the fall in the stock market represents a shift in wealth from current owners to future buyers. People who buy stocks today get the same asset for $3.6 trillion less than those who purchased stock at the peak of the bubble...

One caveat: the housing boom distorted the housing market, and so created housing stock that may be intrinsically less valuable than it should be, because it's composed of the wrong kinds of houses (3,000-4,000 square feet, anyone?) in the wrong places - sprawled out into new exurbs. That means higher energy costs, m0re time in traffic, and perhaps less economically dynamic communities than more intelligent development might have produced. The detritus of the housing bubble is visible on any road trip -- for example, the long rows of behemoth single-family homes lining I-90 for dozens of miles west of Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

Another caveat: lots of stocks will disappear in a wave of bankruptcies. To say that that's part of the natural order of things begs the question of whether we come out the other end with a more- or less-dynamic set of companies, and whether those companies produce more or less sustainable wealth for more or fewer people. If the US. auto industry disappears, for example (or the U.S.-branded behemoths, in any case), that will create enormous hardship -- though whether that loss would prove to be a long-term good or evil is impossible to know at this point.

Still, no one ever said that creative destruction was efficient. Atkinson's larger point -- -- that this bust will transfer wealth from the old to the young, and from the wealthy to the middle class -- gives new resonance to the term correction:

The real issue is who bought high and who is now able to buy low. Generally, older people who hoped to sell their assets at high prices have been made worse off. But don't go clamoring for an increase in Social Security benefits for the AARP set quite yet. For most older Americans who bought houses before 2000, home values are exactly where they would be had the price increases between 1987 and 2002 continued in a straight line, instead of booming from 2002 to 2005 and subsequently crashing. The same applies to equity values. Even with the recent bear market, the S&P 500 is still higher than it would be had it increased from 1985 to the present at the rate it did from 1950 to 1985. Indeed, from 1980 to the present, the S&P 500 has increased in value 30 percent more than the economy as a whole.

The second set of "losers" are the rich. The fact that the top 10 percent of American households own at least 70 percent of American assets means that the recent decline in asset prices hit the richest the hardest..

The fact that the losses are concentrated among the rich and baby boomers is not a bad thing. The last several decades have seen the wealthiest Americans get wealthier much faster than the average American. If they lose more now, it just helps reverse a longstanding inequitable trend. Likewise, if the collapse in stock prices means that more people now in their 50s and 60s (including me) have to work an extra few years before retiring, it is all to the good.

I'm reminded of the alleged mantra of Rahm Emanuel: a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The core of Obama's campaign was a commitment to reverse the 30-year trend of rising income inequality, to restore "balance" and "fairness" to our economy. His whole budget is oriented toward that overriding goal This correction, if it doesn't spiral into political instability, authoritarianism and war, may provide a gigantic shove in the right direction.

Emanuel's box score: lots of runs, hits and errors

Counterbalancing the hand-wringers who were convinced throughout the stimulus bill drama that Obama had lost control of the process are those convinced that Obama brilliantly maneuvered the Republicans into exposing themselves as intellectually bankrupt ideologues and poseurs.

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers, for example, cheered an Obama

cool as a cucumber, playing his game, five steps ahead, setting up moves that won't come to fruition for months or years, while his opposition flails at the thin air where he used to be.

Kos blogger JCWilmore made a case that Obama sprang a trap on the Republicans:

Did Obama see that the Republican Party has shrunk to its most hard core activist roots? That the Republican Party has lost the ability to maneuver and make deals? Did Barack Obama know that the Republican Party was in a position where it had no choice but to pander to the very worst of its out of touch base? Did Barack Obama simply want to catch the Republican Party and its leadership on camera while it behaved badly and ignored the American peoples' desire for some kind of economic relief?... Barack Obama brought the cameras and the Republican Party and its leadership performed precisely as expected.

I don't see either of these portrayals as exactly wrong. Obama does plan 'five moves ahead,' in the sense that he develops long-range plans and sticks to them as long as they're working (see: campaign for President). He may have 'laid a trap' for Republicans to the extent of concluding that if they did reject his overtures, the rejection would probably damage them more than it did him.

But there's a tendency too for Obama's supporters, like any charismatic leader's supporters, to credit their hero with superhuman foresight and strategic acumen. Against that tendency, a postmortem from the Obama camp (mainly Rahm Emanuel) reported by Politico's Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin offers a corrective:

White House aides say they have concluded that Obama too frequently lost control of the debate and his own image during the stimulus battle. By this reckoning, the story became too much about failed efforts at bipartisanship and Washington deal-making, and not enough about the president’s public salesmanship....

Meeting with reporters Thursday night, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said that there were times during the stimulus debate when “I don’t think we were sharp about the benefits” of the legislation, letting Washington process dominate the message.

Reflecting as “somebody who has been in this town,” he observed that “there’s an insatiable appetite for the notion of bipartisanship here and we allowed that to get ahead of ourselves.”...

During his Thursday roundtable with print reporters, Emanuel pointed proudly to the “set of accomplishments” from Obama’s first three weeks, but acknowledged: “There are things both on the inside and the outside I would have changed.”

“Inside, being how we would have handled certain negotiations,” he explained, noting that given the size and speed of a bill with “these many moving parts, there are differences [of] interpretation.”

The process of trial, error and postmortem implicit in Emanuel's review tracks with Obama's own outline of the policymaking process as he envisions it, reported by Ronald Brownstein in National Journal:

Obama displayed the same instinct -- clarity about his goals, flexibility about his tactics -- in discussing the plan Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled this week to stabilize the banking and credit system. In the conversation, Obama reprised some of the arguments he's raised to defend the plan from the widespread reaction on Wall Street and Capitol Hill that it lacked specifics. But most interesting was the way he described the proposal as a work in progress that inexorably will evolve as conditions do. "Here's the bottom line," he said. "We will do what works. It is going to take time to lay out every aspect of this plan, and there are going to be certain aspects of any plan... which will require reevaluation and... some experimentation -- [a sense that] if that doesn't work, then you do something else."

Does that MO suggest that Obama will try something other than bipartisanship? No. Brownstein characterizes Obama as firm in his goals, flexible as to process. I was going to write here that Obama sees bipartisanship as a goal, not a tactic. But that's not exactly right; it's neither precisely. It's just hard-wired into the way he operates:

Obama said the near-unanimous Republican opposition, after all his meetings with GOP legislators, would not discourage him from reaching out again on other issues. "Going forward, each and every time we've got an initiative, I am going to go to both Democrats and Republicans and I'm going to say, 'Here is my best argument for why we need to do this. I want to listen to your counterarguments, if you've got better ideas, present them, we will incorporate them into any plans that we make and we are willing to compromise on certain issues that are important to one side or the other in order to get stuff done,'" he said.

Cooperation on the economic agenda, he suggested, may have been unusually difficult because it "touched on... one of the core differences between Democrats and Republicans" -- whether tax cuts or public spending can best stimulate growth. He predicted there may be greater opportunity for cooperation on issues such as the budget, entitlements and foreign policy. And if he keeps reaching out, he speculated, Republicans may face "some countervailing pressures" from the public "to work in a more constructive way." White House aides suggest that regardless of how congressional Republicans react on upcoming issues, Obama will pursue alliances with Republican governors and Republican-leaning business groups and leaders.

Yet while promising to continue to seek peace with congressional Republicans, Obama also made clear he's prepared for the alternative. "I am an eternal optimist [but] that doesn't mean I'm a sap," he said pointedly. "So my goal is to assume the best but prepare for a whole range of different possibilities in terms of how Congress reacts."

That sounds like a blueprint for foreign interaction as well.