The Progressive Pen

Thank you sir, may I have another?

Incredibly, the Obama administration still holds delusions of bipartisanship.  Sam Stein of the Huffington Post reports:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Monday that President Obama is willing to "add various elements" to health care legislation suggested by Republican lawmakers during an upcoming bipartisan meeting on the topic…

"We have to get, frankly, the Republican members of the House and Senate to re-engage in this process," she declared. "I think it is not acceptable that half of the legislative body pushed away from the table when this conversation began months ago and basically said, 'We don't want to participate in this process.’

So, rather than showing actual leadership by pushing the Democrat-crafted bill through Congress, the Obama administration wants to "reengage" Republicans.

Earth to President Obama: Republicans do not care about healthcare reform.  Their foremost concern is that you fail.

How Obama can continue to be so naïve is beyond me.

 

Technorati Tags: Health care reform,Obama

You Are a Coward

Via The Huffington Post:

“You are a coward, Joe Lieberman.”

So declared Ed Schultz in an impassioned plea for health care reform.

 

Technorati Tags: Health care,Ed Schultz

Reich: Our Incredibly Shrinking Democracy

In his latest column for the Huffington Post, Robert Reich declares:

I wish conservatives would stop complaining about big government and start worrying about the real problem -- small democracy.

What exactly does Reich mean by "small democracy"?  He explains:

It seems as if more and more decisions that should be made democratically are being shunted off somewhere to a few people who make them in back rooms. Which programs should be cut, which entitlements pared back, and what taxes raised in order to reduce the long-term budget deficit? Hmmm. Let's convene a commission and have them decide.

Commissions are a default mechanism when politicians want to hand off difficult issues to "experts." But reducing the long-term budget deficit has almost nothing to do with expertise. It's about our nations' values and priorities. Nothing could be more central to the democratic process.  (Emphasis added)

Democracy requires at least three things: (1) Important decisions are made in the open. (2) The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate them, so the decisions can be revised in light of what the public discovers and wants. And (3) those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters.

Reich notes that the problem extends far beyond the proposed independent deficit reduction committee.  We are witnessing an alarming lack of transparency with some of the very largest government programs and initiatives.

Among the most egregious examples Reich lists:

• TARP --“The notorious Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) began with a virtual blank check from Congress. Treasury officials then secretly decided which companies were to receive hundreds of billions of dollars.”
• The Fed -- "The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, has gone far beyond its traditional role of setting short-term interest rates. It has bought up massive amounts of debt -- mortgage debt, Treasury bills, and debt instruments emanating several public agencies, many of them supporting a wide range of private entities. No one outside the Fed knows the ultimate beneficiaries of all this government backing, the criteria used by the Fed for making these commitments, or even how much debt the Fed is buying.

Reich's point is not to debate whether the expanded role of Treasury and the Fed was necessary.  Rather, Reich questions the bizarre cloak of secrecy under which Treasury and the Fed are permitted to spend hundreds of billions of dollars.

Reich appropriately observes:

Even if the economic emergency justified such secrecy -- and it's hard to see exactly why it would -- the emergency is over, and yet closed-door decision making continues. Will Treasury use what's left of TARP to help stimulate more jobs and, if so, how? Will the Fed stop buying mortgage-backed securities? No one knows.

 

Technorati Tags: Robert Reich,TARP

A Reason Not to Donate to the DNC

From the Huffington Post:

The Democratic National Committee is defending its decision to spend nearly $500,000 on television ads that, in the process of defending Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) for his support of health care reform, took a swipe at a public option for insurance coverage.

On Monday, Joe Sudbay of Americablog reported that the DNC had forked over $459,760.00 to the Nebraska Democratic Committee, which, in turn, used that money to sponsor television ads on Nelson's behalf. Those ads featured the senator explaining his support for health care legislation in part by noting he had changed the legislation so that insurance coverage would not be "run by the government." It was a clear slight at the public plan.

Liberals already had a reason to be wary of donating money to the DNC, when the money could conceivably end up in the hands of conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson, who tried to derail healthcare reform.

Now we are learning that the DNC is funding ads that actually defend Nelson's actions?

Very, very troubling

The DNC has certainly gone downhill fast since Howard Dean’s days at the helm.

 

Technorati Tags: Ben Nelson,Howard Dean,DNC,healthcare reform

The Wrong Direction

Barack Obama, by all accounts, is a bright individual.  Yet he seems determined to ignore that timeless lesson: It's the economy, stupid.

Obama must have created quite an insular bubble at the White House if he thinks the public's foremost concern is the deficit.  No, Mr. President.

I know this may sound shocking, but when the country is mired in double-digit unemployment -- with little hope for significant improvement in the near future -- the electorate is bound to be angry.

But Mr. Obama evidently has placed a higher priority on triangulation than he has on job creation.

Obama's plan to enact a three-year freeze on a large portion of discretionary spending shows he just does not get it.  Robert Reich explains why this course of action is wrongheaded:

A pending freeze will make it even harder to get jobs back because government is the last spender around. Consumers have pulled back, investors won’t do much until they know consumers are out there, and exports are miniscule.

Simply put, the government should be spending more, not less.  In the short term, Obama's problem is that the deficit is too small.

The country needs another FDR; however, Mr. Obama seems intent on channeling Herbert Hoover.

 

Update:

Not surprisingly, Mark Thoma and Brad DeLong both have harsh words for Obama's Herbert Hoover initiative.

“It is hard to imagine a less competent legislative operation,” writes Delong.

 

Technorati Tags: Obama,Robert Reich,Herbert Hoover,FDR,Brad DeLong,Mark Thoma

Overstocked

Frank Rich summarizes the current political climate:

The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.

 

Technorati Tags: Frank Rich,Obama,Robert Rubin

He called it.

Paul Krugman's latest blog post entitled, "He Wasn't the One We've Been Waiting for," strikes a grim tone:

I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.

Krugman's doubts about Mr. Obama are well chronicled, dating back to the campaign for the Democratic party’s 2008 presidential nomination.  Krugman's major criticisms of Obama during the primary campaign basically boiled down to this:

• The three major candidates for the Democratic nomination proposed broadly similar agendas. To the extent that policy differences did exist among the candidates, Mr. Obama's policy proposals were the least bold and progressive.
• Mr. Obama displayed a disturbing willingness to attack his opponents from the right.
• Mr. Obama also displayed a disturbing tendency to adopt right-wing talking points in a misguided effort to sound bipartisan.
• Mr. Obama's intent to give insurance companies “a seat at the table” for healthcare suggested disturbing naïveté on Obama’s part.

Diehard Obama supporters were quick to dismiss Krugman's criticisms as some sort of unjustified favoritism towards the other candidates (remember the rumor about Krugman's nonexistent son working for the Clinton campaign?).

However, the truth is, Krugman was simply viewing Mr. Obama through a different lens than were many of Obama’s diehard supporters.  Looking past Obama's lofty message of "hope" and "change," Krugman evaluated Mr. Obama based on his policy proposals.  In the end, Krugman was left wondering whether Mr. Obama “was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.”

The point of this post is not to suggest that we would have been better off if Clinton or Edwards won the nomination.  Rather, I am writing this because, in 2007 and 2008, there was actually somewhat of a backlash against Krugman among progressives that backed Obama.  How dare Krugman attack their hero (never mind that Krugman's criticisms were from the left, in support of progressive ideals)?

Well, it is now clear that Krugman’s doubts about Obama much were justified.  Much -- if not most -- of the Democratic Party's progressive base is now disillusioned with the Obama administration’s performance thus far.

Krugman did not say it, so I will: he told us so.

 

Technorati Tags: Paul Krugman,Barack Obama,2008 Democratic primary

Bipartisanship

Drew Westen writes: “Obama Finally Gets His Victory For Bipartisanship”

The President's steadfast refusal to acknowledge that we have a two-party system, his insistence on making destructive concessions to the same party voters he had sent packing twice in a row in the name of "bipartisanship," and his refusal ever to utter the words "I am a Democrat" and to articulate what that means, are not among his virtues. We have competing ideas in a democracy -- and hence competing parties -- for a reason. To paper them over and pretend they do not exist, particularly when the ideology of one of the parties has proven so devastating to the lives of everyday Americans, is not a virtue. It is an abdication of responsibility.

 

Technorati Tags: Bipartisanship,Obama

Joementum

A trip down memory lane, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Joementum is a portmanteau of "Joe" and "momentum". The word was originally coined by 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Joseph Lieberman, who, shortly before coming in a disappointing fifth in the New Hampshire 2004 Democratic primary, insisted that his campaign was "picking up Joementum." His finish in the primary was later declared to be part of a "three way split decision for third place."

Since then, the term has become popular among some bloggers as a satirical reference to both Lieberman himself and his election efforts, usually referring to the perceived lack of potential for success of a campaign or endeavor. If a candidate is failing to advance in the polls, they are said to be suffering from "Joementum."

Let’s hope Lieberman’s attempt to kill the public option catches some of his patented “Joementum.”

 

Technorati Tags: Joementum,Joe Lieberman,public option,heath care

SuperFreakonomics

Via Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker has a wonderfully written review of “SuperFreakonomics.”  Kolbert focuses on the book’s much-maligned (deservedly so) chapter on global warming:

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong.

 

Technorati Tags: Krugman,Kolbert,SuperFreakonomics,global warming,Levitt,Dubner