Ryan Grim recalls how Obama, even though he came into office in 2009 in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis with much bigger Democratic majorities in both houses of congress than Joe Biden just obtained, got slow-walked by the Republicans who dangled the carrot of bipartisanship in front of him and managed to water down all his proposals. His weak response is blamed for the massive losses the party suffered in the 2010 and 2014 mid-term elections which resulted in Republicans winning the majorities in both chambers.
In talks with Sens. Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins, the proposal was whittled down, with Collins arbitrarily insisting no funds for school construction or upgrades be included. So that was cut. The resulting $787 billion package was woefully small, leaving unemployment hovering at 10 percent by November 2010.
…In the end, Specter, still a Republican, joined Snowe and Collins in voting for the rescue package on the Senate floor in February. It came at the cost of paring it down severely and extending the pain of the recession. Though the economy eventually began growing slowly, millions were left out of work, and voters threw Democrats out of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. The recovery plodded along.
The benign view of Obama’s failure was that he had too much faith in his ability to persuade Republicans to do the right thing or in their desire to do the right thing, realizing only too late that the Republicans were acting in bad faith all along, intent on sabotaging any real action. The more cynical view (which I share) is that Obama is a quintessential neoliberal politician of the Clinton mold, people who run for and win office on popular programs but have little interest in carrying out any radical agenda. They actually like having their wings clipped while in office so that they can triangulate and makes deals that absolve themselves of responsibility for the lack of follow through. The fact that Obama chose the utterly reactionary Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff and gave the reins of pushing through his signature health policy to another utterly reactionary senator Max Baucus, who immediately eliminated single payer and even the public options, convinced me that Obama was deep in the neoliberal swamp.
[UPDATE: It was no surprise to me that arch neoliberal Larry Summers, chief economic advisor to Obama in the role of director of his National Economic Council, is one of those now urging Biden to scale down his stimulus package because of fears about inflation and the deficit, favorite talking points of Republicans only when they are out of office. These are the people Obama chose to surround himself with. It is a good sign that the current White House is shunning Summers.]
Grim argues that Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi seem to have decided not to make that same mistake. They are the ones now dangling bipartisanship in front of Republicans to get some of them on board but seem willing to go it alone if they do not come quickly.
In the same interview, Schumer blasted his party’s approach to the Affordable Care Act. “Look at 200[9], where we spent a year and a half trying to get something good done, ACA, Obamacare, and we didn’t do all the other things that had to be done. We will not repeat that mistake,” he said. “We will not repeat that mistake.”
…Republicans in the Senate have countered by suggesting Democrats lop off more than two-thirds of their proposal, bringing it down to $600 billion. That’s an offer the 2009 Democratic Party would have taken seriously. This time around, Montana Sen. Jon Tester, one of the handful of red-state Democrats remaining, told CNN he was fine with the price tag. “I don’t think $1.9 trillion, even though it is a boatload of money, is too much money. I think now is not the time to starve the economy,” he said.
“If it’s $1.9 trillion, so be it,” Manchin told a nonplussed Mika Brzezinski.
…For some reason, Democrats would rather try a different route this time around. On“Morning Joe,” Manchin suggested a lawmaking process so reasonable that, for Senate Democrats, it’s downright radical. “If they wanna be reasonable and they wanna participate, then we work with them,” said Manchin of his GOP colleagues. “Let’s see if they have an amendment, a reasonable amendment. If they have something zeroed” — fully stripped from the package — “it gets no votes. Then the Democrats vote, and we move on.”
A legislative body debating an issue, voting, and allowing that vote to determine the outcome: It’s so crazy, it just might work.
You have to start by assuming that the Republicans will act to oppose any truly progressive policies and will do so in bad faith if they feel that is what it takes.
Biden has indicated that while he will oppose reducing the direct payments of $1,400 that he has proposed, he is willing to consider reducing the income amount at which it starts to get phased out from its current value of $75,000 per person. If that is not enough to get some Republicans to sign on, he should withdraw that offer and go ahead with his original plans under the assumption that Republicans have no intention of signing on unless the whole plan is gutted.
LMFTFY: You have to start by assuming that the Republicans will act … in bad faith …
How far back in history would you need to go to find a counter-example?
Short answer: no.
The current Dem proposal is already making huge compromises, or it’s simply neglecting many alternative proposals which would be a lot more helpful. When I’m not grading on a curve, in which anything that happens to be written into their bill is considered a 100% A+ success if it actually becomes law, it feels too generous to even give this a D-.
But let’s go with D- anyway… is that supposed to be good enough? I’m willing to grant that, as a first step which will be followed by many others that make a lot of very significant and substantive changes, maybe it should at least get a passing grade. However, even if that is what will happen, doubtful as that is, I’m deducting points for wasting precious time on some pitiful half-measures and temporary fixes. It also precludes some better approaches to certain problems from being taken, at least this year if not for a long time to come, because we will be more or less stuck with the less-effective “solutions” they’ve decided to use.
So…. your question. Do I think they’re dealing with our numerous crises competently? If they succeed at doing what they want to do, will this mean we’re not going to face the kind of long-term impacts we experienced a decade ago (in addition to thousands of dead and many more suffering health problems)? No. Just no.
A different question: Will they be rewarded for their efforts in 2022 or 2024 or whenever? I don’t know, and at least for the moment, I don’t give a shit. If I had to bet, it’s probably a “no” for this one too.
Well, it’s probably easier to simply point out that Republicans didn’t make Larry Summers the director of the National Economic Council. Obama did. Doesn’t have anything to do with being “cynical.” It’s just a fact.
By the way, if you haven’t heard, Summers is still out there right now, arguing that we should do almost nothing for ordinary people, because he has scary words: “the deficit.” If he were a Republican, then you would be able to coherently say that it was about an inability “to persuade Republicans to do the right thing.”
But he’s not a Republican. Neither is Joe Manchin or Kristen Sinema. And then there’s Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and all the rest. We’d need to do a whole lot of pretending about what these people stand for (or which party they’re in), if we’re going to say that it’s just about persuading Republicans to do the right thing. It’s just hard to take that seriously. But if that is supposed to be the noble lie that we tell ourselves, then who will persuade the persuaders? It sure seems like they always need a lot of fucking persuading. It’s not them, so who’s going to do it?
@ 1 Pierce R. Butler
How far back in history would you need to go to find a counter-example?
Not that far. Maybe 1864?
1950s and Eisenhower.
Well, at least you’re consistent in not giving a shit whether the USA becomes a theocratic-fascist state.
Pace Admiral Ackbar, it’s NOT a trap.
Obama’s lack of action wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. Coming from the UK, I’ve seen this before.
When I was a kid, we elected the first woman Prime Minister. Yay! Progress! Surely with a lady in charge government will become more compassionate, more caring, better organised, insert stereotype here. Whereas in fact the country was subjected to some of the most outright evil leadership we’ve ever had to deal with. All those people thinking “hey great, there’s a woman in charge” were sadly disabused of the notion that that would make any difference, or indeed not make it worse.
For that reason, when Obama came to power on a wave of (what was it?) “Hope”, I was cynical. Oh, he’s black? (Or as the style guide apparently now would have it, Black). Big fucking deal. He’s still a US President, which means by definition pro-war-all-the-time, anti-gun-control and pro-Wall Street, because if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be there. In fact, drOneBAMA turned out to be surprisingly much worse than even I thought on the pro-war thing, massively increasing troop numbers in various foreign theatres and making Trump actually look good by comparison on that one metric.
I was going to say something like “there will be no progress until a third party, an ACTUALLY progressive party, can be organised”… but I don’t believe that will ever happen. Not because the two-parties-that-are-actually-one are well organised enough to stop it, but rather because the American people don’t want it. Seventy MILLION of them voted Trump, ffs.
I think it’s possible that the USA becomes a theocratic-fascist state, because the evidence suggests that enough Americans WANT it like that. That’s democracy folks.
(One thing, ONE thing Thatcher did to her credit: when the evidence came in about AIDS, she followed the science and instituted a system whereby intravenous drug users could get clean needles. I’ll give her that. Compare and contrast Reagan’s actions. But other than that, the most evil leader I think we’ve ever had. But then I grew up in the industrial north, so I would say that.)
KG, #5:
You read all of that, knowing what a dire situation my country is in, and that trolling is what you come up with? Pretty strange that insulting a random person on the internet is what actually commands your attention.
Anyway, you’re a terrible mind-reader. And on second thought, I’m sure I don’t want those people to be rewarded. I’m not ambivalent about it, but that fact still isn’t particularly relevant at the moment. I do want them to lose handily against some leftists in their primaries, people who will actually work to make this place less of a theocratic-fascist shithole, rather than making things even worse. That’s what I want. And from you, I want less dishonesty, bullshitting and dissembling, because I know you can do much better if you try.