For some reason I read the following E.J. Dionne column with the mistaken belief that it had been authored by George Will. It seemed like Will was making an inordinate amount of sense. Eventually I realized that it violated a basic law of the universe for George Will to make that much sense and that it must have been authored by someone else.
But everything is relative. It’s not a very enlightening piece by Dionne’s standards. Take this:
What, then, can Obama and his discouraged allies do to regain the initiative?
For starters, they must restore a functional relationship between the White House and its sometimes-friends, sometimes-critics on the left. Too often, the White House has been caught whining about its progressive critics. The president’s aides act as if whatever Obama happens to decide is the only sensible and realistic thing to do. For the left to ask Obama to be bolder in testing the limits of the possible means it is doing its job of pushing the president to do more, and to do it faster. Conservatives have mastered this approach. Why can’t liberals do the same?
But too often, progressives have spent more time complaining about what wasn’t done than in finding ways to build on what has actually been achieved. It took decades to complete the modern Social Security system, and years to move from tepid to robust civil rights laws and from modest to comprehensive environmental regulation. Impatience is indispensable to getting reform started; patience is essential to seeing its promise fulfilled.
Considering that this bit is supposed to be about regaining the initiative, it’s pretty weak to lecture the White House about its tendency to defend itself and “the left” about never being satisfied. Those things aren’t going to change. We can be critical of that reality, but we ought not offer it up as something to fix so that we can get our mojo back.
There are two things that will help us get our mojo back: Speaker Boehner and Obama’s reelection campaign. That’s all we need. An improving economy would be nice, but realistically we are going to be fighting over who is to blame for high unemployment and who has a better plan to get something through Congress that will create jobs.
This is our problem.
The economy. Period. It’s the kind of technocratic problem that Obama ought to be really good at, if he is in fact the kind of cool, no drama, results-oriented guy he is sold as being.
The underlying problem has not changed since fall, 2008: bankers and their associates committed major crimes and assumed they’d be able to keep the loot and make other people pay for the fact that they left their banks insolvent shells.
The administration has been all about maintaining confidence – no prosecutions of note, lots of pretty, fraudulent accounting, pretending that providing liquidity at low prices is the same thing as reestablishing solvency etc. ad nauseum.
But nothing has changed. We are still in “extend and pretend” mode for much more than just mortgages. If Geithner and Obama and crew have a solution for this, let’s hear it quickly. Otherwise, it is going to be fair to say they didn’t cause it, but it’s their problem.
Do you have a solution?
Not one that you approve of. You still think that liquidity has been reestablished.
I don’t think booman has to approve of your idea, it just simply has to be doable and effective.
You mean like cramdown? And if you say that’s impossible, well that’s a serious problem. The economy won’t full recover until the housing market does.
I think you are forgetting one depressing fact: Much or all of what these guys did was LEGAL.
Says who? Was all of what BushCo did legal just because no one was ever arrested?
I feel so sorry for my son who is stuck in a house that is now worth much less than he paid for it. He has no hope for escape in the foreseeable future. Heck, I feel sorry for my husband and myself! As we’ve repeatedly moved in pursuit of employment over the last 6 years, every single house we’ve sold went for less than we put into it.
Damn. That’s ugly.
Very ugly.
Boo, I read that Lanny Davis quit the Ivory Coast gig. He said it was because he could do no more, but I am sure it was becasue of the frozen bank account.
On the BBC this morning they said that Gbagbo’s people have gone around and begun marking people’s houses.
Oh, how awful. I don’t know the numbers, but a lot of people have fled.
.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."If that is what Obama’s aides believe then I am in total agreement with them. When I think back to some of the suggestions from the left, realistic and sensible do not come to mind. Suggestions like a trillion dollar stimulus, nationalizing the banks, taking over all of bp, enacting single payer and a slew of other “bolder” moves ALL with complete disregard of the fact that we have a conservative Senate. Advice like “grow a pair” and “grow a spine”, “bully pulpit” and “twist arms” are lame and generic. Maybe just maybe Obama will give the left the respect they think they deserve when they can tell him how to get the votes for these liberal ideas from our Conservadems. Obama has a bold agenda but it has to pass through 500+ people who want to either kill it or water it down. That’s the reality these critics fail to talk about when they demand that Obama do more and go faster.
Ya know, I’m really starting to get the feeling that the “professional left” would really just like to have the same influence over the administration that Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, & Co. has over the Republican party. I sure as hell don’t want that to happen.
And who is the “Professional left”?
The WH (i.e., Obamain reality-based circles) keeps having to defend itself from us big, bad, powerful leftists.
Really. When did John Boehner become a Democratic asset; he is going to be able to dodge responsibility by having the Blue Dogs join the Republicans in shoving stuff through. And if that doesn’t work, he can blame the Senate.
And Obama’s re-election campaign? Is going to create a whole lot more skepticism than the 2008 campaign did. People are going to have to know before the campaign starts what the real accomplishments of his administration were. He still faces the fact that most of the country doesn’t know that the ARRA stimulus lowered taxes on the middle class more than the Bush tax cuts did. Most folks think the ARRA raised taxes. There is an information disconnect here, and it is up to the White House to deal with it. And soon. When the corporate media starts telling the people that they got a tax cut in 2009, I will think that the re-election campaign might actually win. Until then, I would watch out for who the emerging Republican candidates are. And Huckabee is only marginally less dangerous politically than John Thune; Huckabee, unlike McCain, is good at “nicing folks out”.
You know, I made the opposite mistake twenty plus years ago. First time I ever read a George Will column. Read it because I misread the byline. Thought it was Gary Wills. About three paragraphs in I was going ‘WTF, Altzheimers?’