Legal Commentary

Rahmbo And Krugman

By Big Tent Democrat

Jane Hamsher writes on Ryan Lizza's New Yorker piece on WH Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, where Emanuel defends himself from criticism of how the stimulus package was handled. Lizza quotes Emanuel:

“They have never worked the legislative process,” Emanuel said of critics like the Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to stimulate the economy—produced a package that wasn’t large enough to respond to the magnitude of the recession. “How many bills has he passed?”

To me the obvious question is how many difficult bills did Emanuel pass before this one? I think the answer is none. Besides, I thought Emanuel had already admitted mistakes in the handling of the stimulus bill:

Mr. Emanuel owned up to one mistake: message. What he called the outside game slipped away from the White House last week, when the president and others stressed bipartisanship rather than job creation as they moved toward passing the measure. White House officials allowed an insatiable desire in Washington for bipartisanship to cloud the economic message a point coming clear in a study being conducted on what went wrong and what went right with the package, he said.

Krugman's response was pithy and to the point:

Eh. The question is why Obama didn't ask for what the economy needed, then bargain from there. My view is that Collins et al would have demanded $100 billion in cuts from whatever they started from; and that's not the case he answers.

No answer on this from Rahmbo.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on February 23, 2009 (boomark / email).