Bozell Column: Obama Failed to Communicate?
In one of his latest attempts to get his face on every television network in America before the election, President Obama appeared on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart to plead his case to the hip, young, leftist voters who love that show. Obama claimed he had done so much, “We have done things that some folks don't even know about!”
In a more serious interview, Obama told the Los Angeles Times the economic mess he “inherited” required him to take so many rapid actions that he could not "communicate effectively to the public in any coherent way.”
This has to be the most ridiculous spin to emerge to explain the Why Republicans Massacred Us question: Barack Obama somehow failed to communicate his “accomplishments.” This man has been everywhere from MTV to CNBC to Univision to the entire NBC-Universal slate of channels selling his policies. And when he’s not there, the reporters do his bidding regardless. How can a man who was sold to us as an absolutely magic combination of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt now suggest he was made “incoherent” by the economy?
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Column: Lawmakers hate fundraising, but not as much as they hate campaign-finance reform
When all is said and done, the 2010 elections will have cost more than $ 2 billion, or even twice that amount, by some estimates. Those are staggering sums, leading some observers, such as Yahoo’s Daniel Gross, to wonder whether, in a weak economy, we shouldn’t have elections every year. “Quantitative electioneering,” he calls it.
Some of that money has come from small donors, people who felt strongly about the direction of the country and dug into their own pockets to make it better. That’s all for the good. But much of it has come from corporations trying to buy access with winners, secret donors trying to purchase the votes that will make them richer and ideological hit-groups that delight in the scurrilous attacks that candidates themselves would never make. I almost feel bad for our politicians - it’s an unpleasant business they’ve chosen.
Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) is retiring this year. He didn’t lose his race, and he wasn’t down in the polls. He’s just, well, leaving. And one of the reasons is that he’s tired of raising money. “It’s miserable,” he said. “It is not uncommon to have a fundraiser for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner, and if you have spare time in between, you go to an office off Capitol Hill and you dial for dollars. Then the weekend rolls around, and you get on a plane and travel the countryside with a tin cup in your hand. And it gets worse each cycle.”
The problem, he argued, isn’t just that raising money is unpleasant, or just that it gives the rich too much sway, or just that it makes the public cynical (“You want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” Bayh said, “but they look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen”). The real problem is that it means lawmakers can’t do their jobs.
“When candidates for public office are spending 90 percent of their time raising money,” Bayh said, “that’s time they’re not spending with constituents or with public policy experts.”
So, why don’t the politicians do something about it? If raising money is so miserable and corrupting and distracting and discrediting, why not publicly finance campaigns? Or strip away the anonymity of outside groups? Or pass a bill that matches small-donor contributions, thus making it easier for politicians to fund their candidacies by exciting voters rather than lobbyists?
The answer is depressing: Few politicians in office like the current system, but they’re better at it than everyone else is. They’ve got donor networks, relationships with lobbyists, corporate friends and activist groups that will help them out. Their potential challengers don’t.
“The people in the position to make these rules have succeeded in the system as it exists,” Bayh said. “Asking them to change the rules from which they’ve benefited is difficult.”
Consider the lifestyle Bayh outlined: fundraisers three times a day and more on the weekends. Dialing for dollars. And we’ve not even talked about the money you’re supposed to raise for your party to help others get elected.
“The United States Senate is a dues-paying organization now,” Bayh lamented. “Junior members have to raise this much, committee chairs have to raise that much. Find that in a civics book.”
Who would want to run for office, if that’s what running for - and holding - office means? How many people want to give up that much time with their family, that much dignity, that much autonomy? If you’re a successful businessman or a local teacher, why would you want to give up a good life to do this?
From the perspective of the incumbent, that’s all for the better: The more impressive challengers who back off when they realize what’s involved, the fewer impressive challengers they have to face. That helps keep them safe until a wave election like this one will probably be. But for the rest of us, it means the candidates whom the waves bring in are worse than they’d be if running for office was a more attractive proposition.
So for all that the incumbents dislike the system, they tend to like the idea of reforming it even less. Dave Durenberger, a Republican who represented Minnesota in the Senate from 1978 to 1995, told me about his experience trying to reform campaign finance laws. “Phil Gramm was our campaign committee chair back then,” he remembered, “and he tore my picture down in the campaign committee office. Connie Mack and Mitch McConnell came to me and said, ‘You’re going to kill us.’ “
That sort of reaction not only makes it hard for campaign finance reform to pass, it makes it hard for any individual legislator to even propose it.
I asked Bayh if he saw any hope on the horizon. His answer wasn’t what I’d categorize as hopeful, but it had the ring of truth to it: “There’ll be a major scandal at some point that’ll shock the public,” he predicted. “It’ll be worse than what happened with Abramoff. And at that point, the system will be changed.”
Here’s hoping?
Photo credit: Melina Mara/TWP
Broder’s ‘Iran War=Votes’ Column Originated With Daniel Pipes, Via Sarah Palin And Elliott Abrams
David Broder’s column yesterday, in which the once-respected journalist suggested that, “as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war [with Iran], the economy will improve,” has already come under a hail of criticism, on a number of counts.
In regard to Broder’s economic claims, Rudy DeLeon, Senior Vice President of National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress, and who has many years of experience on defense issues both at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, offers this correction:
Defense spending can’t generate an economic recovery. When FDR mobilized the country to become the great “arsenal of democracy,” he was starting from the bottom. There was little shipbuilding, aircraft, or combat vehicle production in place. FDR’s economic mobilization was from the bottom up.
Obama inherits a budget already at $ 700 billion in actual spending for defense. It only supports the jobs already in place. So Broder’s claim about a defense budget bonanza is just wrong.
Broder’s misconceptions about the salutary economic effects of mobilizing for war aside, there’s also his troubling suggestion that President Obama prepare to attack Iran for the political benefits he might realize.
Marc Lynch tracks the path of this argument back to Elliott Abrams. Responding in August to Jeffrey Goldberg’s long piece about the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran, Abrams wrote:
The political side of all this is equally plain. Obama will, by all accounts, suffer a tremendous setback in November and may well be defeated in 2012. Should Iran acquire the Bomb in the next two years — the timetable Jeffrey suggests — Republicans will have an even stronger case that Obama has weakened our national security. The Obama who had struck Iran and destroyed its nuclear program would be a far stronger candidate, and perhaps an unbeatable one.
While Abrams’ piece may represent the moment when the neocon “bomb Iran for votes” argument entered the “serious” foreign policy conversation, however, the trail doesn’t end there.
Back in February, speaking to Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Sarah Palin similarly suggested that President Obama could impress people like Sarah Palin if he “decided to declare war on Iran“:
WALLACE: How hard do you think President Obama will be to defeat in 2012?
PALIN: It depends on a few things. Say he played — and I got this from Buchanan, reading one of his columns the other day — say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided really [to] come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do, but — that changes the dynamics in what we can assume is going to happen between now and three years…
WALLACE: But you’re not suggesting that he would cynically play the war card?
PALIN: I’m not suggesting that. I’m saying if he did, things would dramatically change. If he decided to toughen up and do all that he can to secure our nation and our allies, I think people would, perhaps, shift their thinking a little bit and decide, “Well, maybe he’s tougher than we think he’s — than he is today,” and there wouldn’t be as much passion to make sure that he doesn’t serve another four years.
Typically, Palin was fudging the truth here. She didn’t get the idea from Buchanan, as his piece condemned the idea, which originated, as far as I can tell, with neocon activist Daniel Pipes.
Five days before Palin’s interview, Pipes had written:
Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, make netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon.
After Palin’s interview, Pipes immediately claimed credit, noting “It’s nice to have a major political figure endorse my idea.”
And now it’s been endorsed by “the dean of the Washington press corps.”
Bozell Column: NPR’s Religion Double Standard
National Public Radio’s firing of Juan Williams tells you all you need to know about the radical, and thoroughly intolerant, Left. Juan Williams is a liberal, but still, he isn’t liberal enough. The idea that he would acknowledge a mere thought of discomfort at the idea of people in “Muslim garb” on airplanes in a post-9/11 world became a firing offense. It didn’t matter that he prefaced it with all the perfunctory and politically correct disclaimers about not being a bigot and we shouldn’t blame all Muslims for terrorism.
Fired.
Today’s Left is void of any principles whatsoever. They can be as astonishingly offensive and insulting as they want toward Christians, and no one gets punished. The indefatigable Catholic League provides the documentation.
On April 30 on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” substitute host David Bianculli raved over the leftist musical satirist and Harvard math professor Tom Lehrer for his Catholic-mocking 1965 song “The Vatican Rag.” It has lyrics like this: “Get in line in that processional, step into that small confessional, there a guy who’s got religion’ll tell you if your sin’s original.” Lehrer also sang “So you get down on your knees! Fiddle with your rosaries! Bow your head with great respect, and — Genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!”
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I Think This Column Pretty Well Captures the Mood of the Electorate
(Todd Zywicki)
This is a few days old but I just came across it. I think it pretty much captures the electorate’s view of the upcoming election better than anything else I’ve read: “[I]n the land of epic, mega, ultra, apocalyptic levels of sucking, those who kinda suck are king. Or at least are going to win in a landslide.” With apologies for any redundancy if you’ve already seen it.
Column: What Ben Bernanke needs to tell Congress
The worst word in Washington is “message.” Whenever anything goes wrong, politicians begin blaming their messaging operations, as if a better-chosen sound bite by a more silver-tongued aide would have spared them the consequences of their actions. It’s almost never true. Almost. But for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, the economy — not to mention the Fed’s credibility — might be riding on whether he’s willing and able to talk to Congress.
In a recent speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Bernanke made perfectly clear that the central bank is tired of watching the economy stagnate. “With an actual unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent,” he said, “unemployment is clearly too high” — and, yes, the italics are in his prepared text. So the Federal Reserve is likely to begin purchasing Treasury bonds — “quantitative easing,” it’s called — in an effort to lower interest rates and spur the economy. They did this in 2009, and to great effect.
But the Federal Reserve can’t go it alone. No one gets a job when the central bank buys a bond. It’s only when the Fed’s decision to buy a bond persuades some other economic actor to spend money that hiring ticks up. And thus far, that’s not been happening. Banks and corporations have simply been stockpiling their cash, waiting for a recovery that, paradoxically, won’t take hold until they start lending and spending again.
“I’m worried,” says Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. “I’m quite convinced that it’ll be a lot less effective than the first time we did this, and that makes me worried that it won’t be very effective.” That’s because the last round of QE worked very differently: The Federal Reserve bought mortgage-backed securities at a time when the market for them was frozen. That created liquidity where there wasn’t any. Now they’re planning to buy long-term Treasury bonds that are already in high demand. They’re creating liquidity, in other words, where it already exists.
But there’s one player who could move that money into the economy: Congress. Lawmakers have taken themselves out of the game amid concerns that more deficit-financed stimulus will increase interest rates. The Federal Reserve’s purchases will ensure that won’t happen. Someone, however, has to convince Congress of that, particularly now that the very concept of stimulus has become polarizing. Someone like, say, Bernanke.
Bernanke knows this, or at least he once did. In 2003, he tried to advise Japan on how to escape its long stagnation. “One direct and practical approach is explicit (though temporary) cooperation between the monetary and the fiscal authorities,” he said. “This direction is promising and may succeed where monetary and fiscal policies applied separately have not.”
The problem facing Japan, Bernanke continued, was that low interest rates weren’t persuading businesses and consumers to spend, but the government wasn’t picking up the slack because the public was worried about piling up further debt. “Cooperation between the monetary and fiscal authorities in Japan could help solve the problems that each policymaker faces on its own,” he counseled. The Japanese government could stimulate the economy through tax cuts, and the central bank could print the money to pay for it.
Wouldn’t that just add to the total debt? “To the contrary,” Bernanke said, “from a fiscal perspective, the policy would almost certainly be stabilizing, in the sense of reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio.” In other words, the relevant numerator — the total debt in the hands of the public — would remain unchanged while the denominator — economic output — would be higher. “Nothing would help reduce Japan’s fiscal woes more,” he concluded.
Japan didn’t listen, and its subsequent stagnation offers a cautionary tale.
Today, of course, Bernanke is chairman of America’s central bank and faces a similar problem. Low interest rates aren’t persuading consumers or companies to spend. Large deficits have left the public skeptical of further government action. And slow GDP growth is making the debt picture much worse.
The answer is obvious: “explicit (though temporary) cooperation between the monetary and fiscal authorities.” In practice, that would mean Bernanke gets John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell in a room and says the politics and specifics of this are their job, but the economy needs more fiscal stimulus if it’s going to recover, and the Federal Reserve stands ready to make that not only possible but also virtually costless. Inasmuch as Republicans aren’t big fans of further government spending right now, the best option could be the exact one that Bernanke recommended to Japan: a Fed-financed tax cut. Perhaps a payroll-tax holiday for the next year or two.
Pose this possibility to central bankers, however, and they get queasy. The Federal Reserve and Congress occupy different worlds, and the way the bank’s independence has been protected has been to sell that separation as sacrosanct. “That’s getting close to crossing the line,” Blinder says.
Or is it? On Oct. 4, Bernanke headed to Rhode Island to deliver a speech on the danger of our long-term debt. In it, he called for reforms to Social Security, the health-care system and public-employee pensions, and he concluded by outlining the merits of “legislative agreements intended to promote fiscal responsibility by constraining decisions about spending and taxes.”
All that is the province of Congress, not the central bank. And there’s no reason Bernanke should be more comfortable counseling Congress on reducing deficits than stimulating growth — particularly when growth can do so much to reduce deficits.
As Alan Greenspan discovered when he weighed in in favor of tax cuts in 2001, there are potential risks when a Fed chairman insinuates himself and the Fed into a controversial political and economic debate. But there are risks, as well, in not engaging. If the Federal Reserve unleashes another round of quantitative easing and it fails because there is nobody to spend or invest the money productively, that could damage the bank’s credibility, its effectiveness and, ultimately, its independence. It could also leave the economy trapped in a rut of low growth and high unemployment for a decade or more. That’s not a risk we can take.
Photo credit: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg News.
Bozell Column: Nearly Invisible Harry Reid
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid finally appeared in a debate on October 14 in Las Vegas with his Republican opponent, Sharron Angle. The appearance might come as a surprise to consumers of the national media. While Angle has been pounded relentlessly by national media outlets as being both dangerously radical and ridiculous, Reid has been left alone, and untouched.
But what about Harry? He’s the Majority Leader after all. Is he, like so many of his colleagues, simply afraid to talk about his legislative “accomplishments”? Nobody’s wondered why he hasn’t been making the rounds of interviews on national television. While reporters rush to report the latest “wacky” quote from Angle, the networks haven’t lifted a finger to cover Reid’s cascade of rhetorical stumbles and outrages, especially since Angle won the GOP primary.
We won’t count Reid’s remarks last year comparing opponents of health reform to supporters of slavery, or his describing those opponents as “evilmongers,” which he delighted in repeating and telling reporters he’d coined a new word.
There’s a list of fresh gaffes, and it just keeps growing.
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Column: The five people Obama should hire now
First, Peter Orszag turned in his ID card. Then Christina Romer went. In short order, Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel announced their exits. Jim Jones is gone, too. A lot of people are leaving the White House these days.
But I’m more interested in who should move in. President Obama has filled the open slots by promoting others in his administration. That’s a sign he’s happy with the advice and service he’s received over the past two years. And in many ways, he’s right to be. This administration entered office with the economy teetering on the edge of the abyss. His team has successfully pulled us onto firmer ground.
The next two years, however, will require new thinking. The problems of an acute crisis have given way to the frustrations of a slow recovery. The large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate are likely to be wiped out by a resurgent Republican Party. Concerns about the deficit won’t allow for much in the way of new spending.
The Obama administration needs an agenda suited to these circumstances, and to help them think one up, it needs fresh eyes and new voices.
Here are five suggestions. (Disclaimer: I didn’t tell these people I’d be mentioning them, and I’m not personally close with any of them. This is about their ideas, not their personalities.)
1) Karen Kornbluh: In a previous life, Kornbluh was Sen. Obama’s policy director. Now, she’s serving as our ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It’s not exactly hard labor. She gets a house in Paris. But it’s time Obama called her back.
With health-care reform and the expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Obama administration has done important work expanding and strengthening the safety net. Now officials need to turn their attention to the focus of Kornbluh’s work: modernizing it. These programs were developed in an age when men were the breadwinners, women stayed home to raise children, single-parent families were rare, and workers tended to stick with a single employer for decades. All of that has changed, but our social supports haven’t.
Kornbluh’s vision is to refocus our entitlements on “juggler families”: income-insecure families “juggling to make ends meet and so dependent on the mother’s income [that] time off to care for a sick child or a new baby can result in devastating income interruptions and even job loss.” Her proposals include updating Social Security so it counts time spent parenting and establishing a family-insurance program that would help earners who have to take time off to care for a child or parents. This sort of thinking is overdue, and you could even imagine it appealing to conservatives interested in supporting families.
2) Mark McClellan: McClellan led the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush. He was instrumental in implementing the Medicare prescription drug benefit. That gives him two things the Obama administration definitely needs: credibility with Republicans on health care and experience making a major health-care initiative work.
McClellan has been a cautious friend and frequent critic of the Obama administration’s health-care reforms. He complimented the legislation for making important progress on coverage and payment reforms while criticizing it for falling short on medical malpractice and consumer-driven policies. He deserves to be heard out on both points, and if Republicans fail in their efforts to repeal the legislation - and they probably will - some might be interested in having a sympathetic voice on the inside.
3) Dean Baker: Think the administration’s economic team is too insular? Baker, a contrarian economist who was among the first to spot the housing bubble and who’s been a vocal critic of the administration’s economic policies (and The Washington Post’s economic coverage), will fix that.
Baker can be counted on for innovative policy thinking. (For instance: How about doing away with pharmaceutical patents? Or letting foreclosed homeowners rent their homes? Or slapping a transaction tax on Wall Street to slow things down and reduce our deficit?) And, perhaps more important, he is uninterested in currying favor with those in power. It’s hard to imagine him playing well with others in the White House, but then, that’s the point. He’ll say things they don’t want to hear, but should.
4) Christina Romer: Romer, who just left the White House, won’t exactly bring a new perspective. But she brings the right perspective. In her final speech as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, she offered the full-throated call for more fiscal stimulus, which the administration has largely abandoned. “Concern about the deficit cannot be an excuse for leaving unemployed workers to suffer,” she said. “We have tools that would bring unemployment down without worsening our long-run fiscal outlook, if we can only find the will and the wisdom to use them.”
She’s right. The stimulus may not poll well, but it worked. Unemployment would’ve been much higher without it. Was it too small? It was. But Romer knew that at the time. She calculated that we needed $ 1.2 trillion. We got a bit more than half that, and then the economic crisis proved worse than it seemed when Romer was running the numbers.
Unemployment is now at 10 percent, and though the stimulus probably kept it from brushing 12 percent, the economic misery has turned voters against the intervention. The administration can’t hide from this fight, however. The job situation is too grim for the government to simply leave the unemployed to their fate. Romer, speaking freely in her final days in office, had it right.
5) A political scientist: In general, Washington is split between people who specialize in governing (most of them economists or lawyers or public policy graduates) and people who specialize in running elections. Political scientists, who study the history and run the numbers on both pursuits, are not invited to the table. Adding to the snub, the president has hosted at the White House groups of journalists, pundits and historians. Again, no political scientists.
That’s a shame, because the White House could use some political science. If the administration wanted out of the 24-hour news cycle that obsesses over who’s up and who’s down, it should’ve grabbed some of the people who’ve studied the waxing and waning of the liberal and conservative brands since the 1930s. (Did you know that on the eve of FDR’s 1936 rout of the Republican Party, a majority of Americans polled by Gallup identified themselves as conservative?) The White House, which was shocked by the Republican Party’s unwillingness to offer early cooperation, could have benefited from congressional scholars who knew that both history and electoral incentives ensured that Republicans would obstruct from Day One.
I could go on. Pick an issue, or a political quandary, and odds are there’s a wealth of political science literature on the topic. The White House needs someone who can bring the profession’s best insights and evidence to the administration’s deliberations. And I hear there are even free desks for them to sit in.
Photo credit: White House.
Column: The five people Obama should hire now
First, Peter Orszag turned in his ID card. Then Christina Romer went. In short order, Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel announced their exits. Jim Jones is gone, too. A lot of people are leaving the White House these days.
But I’m more interested in who should move in. President Obama has filled the open slots by promoting others in his administration. That’s a sign he’s happy with the advice and service he’s received over the past two years. And in many ways, he’s right to be. This administration entered office with the economy teetering on the edge of the abyss. His team has successfully pulled us onto firmer ground.
The next two years, however, will require new thinking. The problems of an acute crisis have given way to the frustrations of a slow recovery. The large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate are likely to be wiped out by a resurgent Republican Party. Concerns about the deficit won’t allow for much in the way of new spending.
The Obama administration needs an agenda suited to these circumstances, and to help them think one up, it needs fresh eyes and new voices.
Here are five suggestions. (Disclaimer: I didn’t tell these people I’d be mentioning them, and I’m not personally close with any of them. This is about their ideas, not their personalities.)
1) Karen Kornbluh: In a previous life, Kornbluh was Sen. Obama’s policy director. Now, she’s serving as our ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It’s not exactly hard labor. She gets a house in Paris. But it’s time Obama called her back.
With health-care reform and the expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Obama administration has done important work expanding and strengthening the safety net. Now officials need to turn their attention to the focus of Kornbluh’s work: modernizing it. These programs were developed in an age when men were the breadwinners, women stayed home to raise children, single-parent families were rare, and workers tended to stick with a single employer for decades. All of that has changed, but our social supports haven’t.
Kornbluh’s vision is to refocus our entitlements on “juggler families”: income-insecure families “juggling to make ends meet and so dependent on the mother’s income [that] time off to care for a sick child or a new baby can result in devastating income interruptions and even job loss.” Her proposals include updating Social Security so it counts time spent parenting and establishing a family-insurance program that would help earners who have to take time off to care for a child or parents. This sort of thinking is overdue, and you could even imagine it appealing to conservatives interested in supporting families.
2) Mark McClellan: McClellan led the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush. He was instrumental in implementing the Medicare prescription drug benefit. That gives him two things the Obama administration definitely needs: credibility with Republicans on health care and experience making a major health-care initiative work.
McClellan has been a cautious friend and frequent critic of the Obama administration’s health-care reforms. He complimented the legislation for making important progress on coverage and payment reforms while criticizing it for falling short on medical malpractice and consumer-driven policies. He deserves to be heard out on both points, and if Republicans fail in their efforts to repeal the legislation - and they probably will - some might be interested in having a sympathetic voice on the inside.
3) Dean Baker: Think the administration’s economic team is too insular? Baker, a contrarian economist who was among the first to spot the housing bubble and who’s been a vocal critic of the administration’s economic policies (and The Washington Post’s economic coverage), will fix that.
Baker can be counted on for innovative policy thinking. (For instance: How about doing away with pharmaceutical patents? Or letting foreclosed homeowners rent their homes? Or slapping a transaction tax on Wall Street to slow things down and reduce our deficit?) And, perhaps more important, he is uninterested in currying favor with those in power. It’s hard to imagine him playing well with others in the White House, but then, that’s the point. He’ll say things they don’t want to hear, but should.
4) Christina Romer: Romer, who just left the White House, won’t exactly bring a new perspective. But she brings the right perspective. In her final speech as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, she offered the full-throated call for more fiscal stimulus, which the administration has largely abandoned. “Concern about the deficit cannot be an excuse for leaving unemployed workers to suffer,” she said. “We have tools that would bring unemployment down without worsening our long-run fiscal outlook, if we can only find the will and the wisdom to use them.”
She’s right. The stimulus may not poll well, but it worked. Unemployment would’ve been much higher without it. Was it too small? It was. But Romer knew that at the time. She calculated that we needed $ 1.2 trillion. We got a bit more than half that, and then the economic crisis proved worse than it seemed when Romer was running the numbers.
Unemployment is now at 10 percent, and though the stimulus probably kept it from brushing 12 percent, the economic misery has turned voters against the intervention. The administration can’t hide from this fight, however. The job situation is too grim for the government to simply leave the unemployed to their fate. Romer, speaking freely in her final days in office, had it right.
5) A political scientist: In general, Washington is split between people who specialize in governing (most of them economists or lawyers or public policy graduates) and people who specialize in running elections. Political scientists, who study the history and run the numbers on both pursuits, are not invited to the table. Adding to the snub, the president has hosted at the White House groups of journalists, pundits and historians. Again, no political scientists.
That’s a shame, because the White House could use some political science. If the administration wanted out of the 24-hour news cycle that obsesses over who’s up and who’s down, it should’ve grabbed some of the people who’ve studied the waxing and waning of the liberal and conservative brands since the 1930s. (Did you know that on the eve of FDR’s 1936 rout of the Republican Party, a majority of Americans polled by Gallup identified themselves as conservative?) The White House, which was shocked by the Republican Party’s unwillingness to offer early cooperation, could have benefited from congressional scholars who knew that both history and electoral incentives ensured that Republicans would obstruct from Day One.
I could go on. Pick an issue, or a political quandary, and odds are there’s a wealth of political science literature on the topic. The White House needs someone who can bring the profession’s best insights and evidence to the administration’s deliberations. And I hear there are even free desks for them to sit in.
Photo credit: White House.
Bozell Column: Parents vs. ‘Public Health’
Why does it seem at times that our government and “public health” advocates think parents are a social problem? Parents at Hardy Middle School in the affluent Glover Park neighborhood in Washington, DC were shocked to discover that a sex-and-drug-use survey had been distributed to 12-year-olds in their physical education classes without any warnings or consent forms sent to parents.
The first words the children read were these: “This questionnaire asks you about sex and drugs (like cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy, and marijuana).” Of course, they promised, “Your answers will not be told to anyone in your school or family.”
The mindset of these popsicle psychiatrists was evident right off the bat. The very first question was “What is your gender?” Two possibilities, you think? Try four boxes: Male and female, plus – “transgender (M to F)” and “transgender (F to M).” This was handed out to 12-year-olds.
