You know, I am beginning to forget some of the details of the Clinton impeachment saga, but I seem to remember that Newt Gingrich had a rather prominent role in it. There were a lot of Republicans that had some familiarity with extramarital blowjobs from their interns who didn’t think the issue should become a federal offense. But Newt thought differently. So, it’s interesting to see what he is saying now about the Big Dog.
WALLACE: There were stories back when you were Speaker that you would be very upset and then you’d get into the presence of Bill Clinton and he could charm you. Can Barack Obama charm you?
NEWT: Well, he’s not charming in the same sense that Clinton is. I mean, President Obama is a very smart, very gifted person, a very good strategic thinker. He’s a very pleasant person. The fact is Clinton was charming, but we got welfare reform. And he was charming, but we got a tax cut. And he was charming, but we balanced the budget. So I’m perfectly happy to be charmed with somebody who says “yes”.
If I were new to politics, a statement like that might make my head explode. Unfortunately, it makes perfect sense.
All Newt is saying is what every liberal/progressive Democrat already knew, which is that Bill Clinton was one of the least progressive Democratic presidents we had in the 20th century on just about every front.
I’m not sure which is more ironic: that Newt led a no-holds-barred assault against a president who was not discernibly that far to the left of Richard Nixon, or that he’s now opposing a president whose main achievement since taking office has been the largest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the rich in human history.
If I had to draw a conclusion from all this, I’d say that Newt is a nutjob, but that’s not new information either.
I have a more glass half-full view.
It’s a splendid accounting you’ve assembled there. I’d say the glass is mostly full, actually. It’s just that Obama’s economic policy so far is a soggy cigar butt sitting at the bottom of the glass.
All of the major complaints I have with Obama — excluding for the moment some serious uneasiness about what we’re doing in Afghanistan — revolve around the open-ended series of bailouts.
While on the one hand, I realize that it is necessary to keep the banks afloat because they have become too big to fail, two things give me pause. The first and foremost is that there seems to be little movement towards resolving the long-term problem that brought us here: that we permitted the major banks to become too big to fail in the first place. Without a substantial fundamental restructuring of the banking system, we’re going to be right back where we are now in two or three decades.
The second issue, which is probably more important in the long run than in the short run, is that Obama’s approach to the economy fairly reeks of the misguided Reagan-era notion that the financial sector drives the economy. While it certain can stimulate other areas of the economy through investment, most of what goes on in the financial sector is speculative to one degree or another and is, in essence, a form of parasitism. Vast sums of money are transferred to speculators who themselves produce nothing and whose utility to anyone else is limited at best.
In short, I would feel a lot better if Obama showed some sign of recognizing that the powers that be in the financial sector are neither essentially benign nor acting in good faith. In an earlier age, when the media was not entirely owned by them, they were called robber barons for a reason. Obama’s efforts and compromise and reconciliation are a refreshing change from the previous administration, but he needs to come to terms with the fact that there are a few genuinely bad people in the world — and in this country — and no amount of goodwill is going to change that.