Great pictures by White House photographer Pete Souza showing President Obama working to pass the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. Here are a few of the pictures, documenting Obama’s efforts to reach out to Republicans:
I guess it was appropriate that President Obama tried out bipartisanship in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day. He showed some love to the Republicans during the stimulus debate only to be spurned. I got a kick out of Ari Melber’s metaphor of President Obama’s failed courting of Congressional Republicans: “Mr. President, They’re Just Not That Into You.” Worth checking out. I wish I’d thought of that title!
My take-away from the first 24 days of the Obama administration is that President Obama is serious about bipartisanship, but perhaps to a fault. Clearly, he has tried to work with Republicans and bring a change of tone to our politics. During the stimulus debate, he met with Congressional Republicans, invited them to the White House, and even nominated a conservative Republican to head the Commerce Department. No one can deny that President Obama has largely succeeded in bringing some civility back in the relations between a President and the opposition party.
All of this is good in my view. One reason I supported Barack Obama over other Democratic nominees in the primaries was his commitment to changing the tone in Washington. I believed, and still do, that building goodwill among your political opponents can achieve breakthroughs in legislation that a bitter, highly partisan atmosphere would not allow.
But while the President’s conciliatory gestures have earned him praise from Republicans and may be a reason for his popularity in the country, it is just as clear that bipartisanship isn’t working out. No Republicans in the House voted for the original stimulus bill and only three Republicans in the Senate did so. It is yet to be seen whether any more Republicans vote for the final bill, but I’m not too optimistic. And then most recently, Sen. Judd Gregg has withdrawn himself from consideration as the nominee for Commerce Secretary, citing unbridgeable ideological differences with the President.
Meanwhile, partisan commentators on the left are getting impatient with President Obama’s desire to achieve bipartisan consensus. Most visible is Paul Krugman, whose op-ed in today’s NYT is an example of a tough indictment from the left of Obama’s willingness to compromise with Republicans on the stimulus:
Officially, the administration insists that the plan is adequate to the economy’s need. But few economists agree. And it’s widely believed that political considerations led to a plan that was weaker and contains more tax cuts than it should have — that Mr. Obama compromised in advance in the hope of gaining broad bipartisan support. We’ve just seen how well that worked.
Here’s where I agree with Krugman’s criticisms of the President and other similar analysis:
1) President Obama was wrong to begin the debate by conceding so many tax cuts in his original bill. Apparently, the administration originally thought that 80 votes in the Senate was a realistic goal, and we now know that was a ridiculous assessment of what was possible. However, this fact should have been apparent to Rahm Emmanuel and other senior advisors in the administration. The President should have kept his tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans but told Republicans that any further tax cuts would only happen if they came on board. If they didn’t, he would go to the moderates and try to win their support and just ram the bill through. As, in fact, happened anyway.
2) Obama should have offered a bill that was over $1 trillion. By starting well under that number, it was easy for the Republicans to become emboldened and think that they could take control of the debate. They succeeded in doing so until President Obama finally decided to break out of the Washington echo chamber and go directly to the people, which likely contributed to the stimulus plan’s increased popularity in the country. But if you give your opponents a concession right away in a negotiation, it is just common sense that they will then ask for more and you will end up giving away more than you’d originally planned.
Earlier in his op-ed, Krugman correctly points out the Congressional Republicans’ unwillingness to budge one nanometer from their ideology:
One might have expected Republicans to act at least slightly chastened in these early days of the Obama administration, given both their drubbing in the last two elections and the economic debacle of the past eight years.
But it’s now clear that the party’s commitment to deep voodoo — enforced, in part, by pressure groups that stand ready to run primary challengers against heretics — is as strong as ever. In both the House and the Senate, the vast majority of Republicans rallied behind the idea that the appropriate response to the abject failure of the Bush administration’s tax cuts is more Bush-style tax cuts.
What is the lesson we should take away from this first major partisan battle of the Obama Presidency? I think it is this: the Republican party’s ideological purity at this moment is a clear and present danger to the economic security of our country. If they are not willing to bend at all in return for a Democratic President who is willing to compromise, then perhaps bipartisanship is not possible at this moment. While I would encourage President Obama to continue reaching out to Republicans, maintaining a respectful tone, and trying to work with them, I do not want to see any more watering down of the solutions that we need to solve very serious problems. If most economists believed that a larger stimulus was necessary to really fix the economy, that is what we should have done even if it may have caused some problems.
Of course, even as I write all this, I cannot say for certain that the moderate Republicans senators who are supporting the bill would have supported a larger stimulus package. Should the President and the Democrats have fought for a larger bill even if that resulted in a delay of the bill’s passage, or no passage at all? I follow Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri on Twitter, and she made the point a few days ago that the stimulus package we have is not perfect, but it’s better than no package at all. It’s a cliche that politics is the art of the possible, and this may have been the best our politicians could do.
But I guess I still believe that 1) and 2) above should have been tried first, more skepticism is needed in dealing with the Republicans, and finally, supporters of President Obama need to do a better job of communicating to him our concerns and criticisms when we think he is giving in too much to his opponents.
Any thoughts about this? I’d like to hear more from people about how the President should proceed in terms of bipartisanship. Also, how can supporters become more vocal in our criticisms when he compromises with a party that is not willing to meet him half-way?
Finally: one problem in even writing about the stimulus lately is that we don’t know exactly what is going to be in the final bill. I’m going to post later about how to find good online summaries of what’s in the bill. It looks like the House just released the full bill here, but who really reads this stuff?
Remember who said that? The answer is below. But first…
What is really behind Republican opposition to the President’s stimulus plan? Was the vote Wednesday merely a reflection of an extremely conservative Republican House that would never agree with anything the Democrats would put forward anyway? Did House Democrats really poison the process, as Republicans alleged, by keeping them out of the process of drafting the bill? Are the Republicans sincere in their belief that the House plan will not create enough jobs and will not do a good enough job stimulating the economy? Or, as some Democrats are saying, are the Republicans merely following Rush Limbaugh, who has been demanding that they vote against President Obama’s plan? (Oh, and Limbaugh is also hoping that our new President fails, if you hadn’t heard. What a great guy.)
There’s a lot of speculation and shock out there about the Republicans rebuffing the President after he made such a dramatic overture to them over the past week. But is it really so mysterious? It seems to me that the Republicans are just going ideological and making a savvy political bet.
Under President Bush, Republicans had no clear identity when it came to government spending, and the stimulus presents an opportunity to define themselves. You can hear this happening in the self-congratulatory tone Republicans are taking at the moment in resisting the stimulus. They are going back to being “deficit hawks,” they say. But they are only deficit hawks when Democrats are in office, of course.
A great segment Saturday afternoon from the radio show This American Life clarified to me how much the current debate goes back to a British economist from the early 20th century, John Maynard Keynes. Remember Keynes? You were groggy that morning in economics class too, huh? Keynes is the guy who said–and I paraphrase, sorry economist readers–that to get out of a downturn in the business cycle, the government must spend money to stimulate the economy even if that means running up large deficits. Libertarians hate this idea because they think the free market should always be left to correct itself when the economy sours. But as Keynes pointed out, the economy correcting itself could take a really, really long time, and as he put it, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”
I’ll try to find the podcast of the radio segment and post it here because this excerpt from All Things Considered yesterday doesn’t do it justice. The entire piece is very much worth listening to. In the segment, Adam Davidson discusses the stimulus with a conservative economist and it becomes clear that one of the biggest fears conservatives have right now is that President Obama might actually come close to proving that Keynes was right. (You can’t really “prove” things in economics, but this would be close.) In other words, if the economic stimulus plan passes and the economy recovers in a year or two, a big chunk of the way liberals view the world would have been vindicated by the test of the current recession. A lot of liberals believe that Keynes was already vindicated by FDR during the wartime spending that got us out of the Great Depression, but conservatives tend to disagree. So, if Keynes is proven right now, that would be very, very bad for Republicans because, since the 70s, they have believed that Keynesian economics was dead. As the radio piece goes into, politicians abused Keynesian theory in the 60s and 70s, thus setting the stage for conservative economists and Reagan to take control of the policy debate and argue that Keynes was wrong. If President Obama is right, we will have a new liberal era not only because liberals are in power at the moment, but because they have retaken control of the policy debate from the Reaganites who have set the tone for the past thirty years.
So, since Republicans think Keynes was full of it and that applying his theory to reality won’t work, it’s not much of a surprise that they are opposing President Obama’s stimulus plan. It makes sense for them from both ideological and political points of view. Ideologically they can define themselves as anti-Keynesian libertarians who think we just need to cut taxes and “wait it out”. Politically, they wouldn’t get any credit from the public if Obama’s plan works, so signing onto it wouldn’t do them much good. And if it doesn’t work, they will be able to say “See, we told you so.”
Still, President Obama’s plan contains enough tax cuts that some Republicans may want to sign on in the end. They may think that the plan has more than a fifty percent chance of working. And if it does work, then wouldn’t they be better off having voted for it than against it? The President and the Democrats would still get most of the credit, but at least those who went with the winning team would look smart and bipartisan. Plus, they could always argue that the economy turned around primarily due to their pushing for more tax cuts, not from the government spending.
It looks like the dinner honoring Sen. John McCain on inauguration-eve is the first of its kind. Sure, it’s symbolic, but it’s smart symbolism. I wasn’t crazy about the dinner with conservative columnists earlier this week, but I have to admit that it may be effective. As a candidate, Barack Obama promised to unite the country. It will be one of his most challenging tasks, but he’s off to a good start. What else should President-elect Obama do to reach out to Republicans and where should he draw the line? Is there a danger that there will be too much bipartisanship under President Obama?