• For those of you who’d like to know what’s wrong with President Obama’s stimulus bill, here are two suggestions. One, tune into the Rachel Maddow Show week-nights at 9:00 EDT. Two, read Paul Krugman’s column Mondays and Fridays in the New York Times.
In a recent column entitled “The Destructive Center,“ Krugman began by asking, “What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?” The answer: “A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.”
Krugman, for one, has made it very clear where he stands: and it’s not in the center. In order to extricate ourselves from this mess, he stresses the importance of very large government investments — in infrastructure, healthcare, education, and, yes, autos — “insisting that these be big enough to overwhelm depression, systemic and psychological.” “The worst mistake,” he says, “would be taking a five-foot leap over a seven-foot pit out of fear that acting to save the financial system is somehow ‘socialistic.’”
Krugman blamed the President’s belief “that he can transcend the partisan divide,” a belief, he says, that “warped his economic strategy.” Accordingly, he offered a plan “that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would.” Amazingly, he was listening to Republicans who, like Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, felt that the Obama stimulus bill “wandered off into too much spending.” Excuse me? Too much spending — in a stimulus bill? And this from a Republican, whose president over the past eight years spent us crazy into the biggest deficit in American history. Does this make any sense at all?
And then there was Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader and Republican economic wizard, who, attempting to prove that spending is the way into socialism and not out of a depression, told us with fervor in his voice that “it wasn’t New Deal spending that got us out of the Great Depression, as every historian knows it was the Second World War.” While he’s right about that, what McConnell doesn’t get is that, considered only in economic terms, World War II was . . . well, er . . . government spending. As John Steele Gordon said recently in the Wall Street Journal, “there have always been two reasons for adding to the national debt,” which is, of course, created by deficit spending: “One is to fight wars [and] the second is to counteract recessions.” Deficit spending under Roosevelt did both.
I remember as a kid my father, a staunch Republican, deriding the New Deal by calling it a bunch of “make work” programs and telling me that Roosevelt was paying people to dig holes and then to immediately fill them up — which, by the way, was a conservative fantasy. I wish I had known enough at the time to have asked him what benefit accrued to the U.S. economy from producing a bomb and then dropping it on a German building? Economically, of course, it had the same effect here at home as if it had been dropped in the ocean. Which is to say that producing bombs had everything in the world to do with stimulus, even though economically it was the equivalent of digging a hole and filling it up — or digging a hole, planting a seedling, and filling it up; or building a bridge and letting it stand there while driving cars over it for 50 years; and so on.
And so, events proved President Obama wrong about bipartisanship. Though his advisors at one time thought this bipartisan strategy would gain the happy result of 80 or more votes in the Senate, it wound up eking out a razor-thin 61-36 victory, just one vote more than the required two-thirds to avoid a filibuster. And to do that it was necessary to engage the so-called “centrists.” These were three Republicans (Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and Olympia J. Snow and Susan Collins, both of Maine) and two Independents (Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont) who, added to the 56 Democrats in the Senate, pushed it over the top, doing so, however, at rather great expense to the stimulus purpose of the package. Thus, at the end of the day, after presenting a somewhat watered-down stimulus package and smoozing at “bipartisan” cocktail parties and the like in order to garner Republican votes, he wound up with three. The American people need to ask: Was that a good deal? Was that in the nation’s interest?
While all this was going on in Congress, Rachel Maddow was insisting that the Democrats should abandon the BS about bipartisanship altogether and call the Republicans on their threat to filibuster. Just let a bunch of them stand there in the senate chamber in the dead of night and read the District of Columbia phone book and see what happens, said Rachel. She’s was betting that the nation wouldn’t stand for it. Invoking the sanctity of Senate Rules, Barbara Boxer, the Democrat from California, made a decent, though conventional, explanation of why that wouldn’t work, but it didn’t convince Rachel, and it didn’t convince me either. The Republicans pulled the same legislative tactic, you may remember, when the Democrats proposed amendments to military appropriations bills in the Senate in 2006 designed to bring the troops home by certain dates. There, however, the Republicans were able to operate under cover of such phony principles as “support our troops or be known as a traitor,” stuff that the Dems, including great minds like Carl Levin, fell for hook, line and sinker.
• Now There’s an Idea. Do you remember George W. Bush’s first big push following his reelection in 2004 — just after he announced, “I earned . . . political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”? It was the Republican’s attempt to privatize the Social Security system which, despite the system’s merits as public policy, is the foundation on which the social programs of the Democratic Party rests. It would have changed the system into one that allowed stock-market accounts for individuals otherwise entitled to social security. Wheeeeee! This at a time when even the guys who knew what they’re were doing didn’t know what they were doing. As Nicholas Lemann mused in The New Yorker recently, can anyone even imagine just how that would have worked out by the end of Bush’s presidency?
• Yes We Can — Keep on Protesting. In a close-up on Pete Seeger and Joan Baez in the current issue of Rolling Stone, Baez says that in January after the start of her current tour she began exclaiming, “Yes we did!” One night a woman yelled back, “Now there’s nothing left to protest against anymore,” to which Baez yelled back, “Oh, no, my good woman — this is where it starts.”
Sean Penn made a similar statement in the same issue of Rolling Stone (he’s on the cover). When asked whether he was politically optimistic, Penn replied: “Yeah, I am. I’m optimistic about this man, not about him by himself, and not about his Cabinet. But I’m optimistic about the people who put in him in office — if they support him first but then challenge him.” (Italics mine.)
Despite, or perhaps because of, the hope and promise Barack Obama brings to the nation and to the heart of each of us, it’s still very important that we challenge him from time to time when the situation demands and to protest his policies when we think they’re wrong. We need to remember that President Obama is not a real liberal; he’s a moderate Democrat, one for whom bipartisanship is part of the program, sometimes — as we’ve seen — even to the detriment of the program.
The bottom line: We need him, and he needs us.
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