Legal Commentary

The Narrative: Obama's Fatal Error (For Congressional Dems) On The Inadequate Stimulus

By Big Tent Democrat

The Atlantic's Josh Green:

The faltering recovery and the credibility this has cost the the White House will probably lose the Democrats one or both houses of Congress, making the insufficiency of the stimulus easily the most consequential error for an administration that has done a lot right.

[. . .] The White House insists that it could not have gotten a larger stimulus through Congress, a debatable claim. But by twice neglecting to try, it has staked its fortunes on a policy that has visibly fallen short on the issue of greatest concern, the economy. Because of the divide between the experts and the strategists, nothing is happening. Given the weak state of the economy, the White House cannot claim that the stimulus it settled for has sufficed. Unwilling to call for another one, it is left to look on silently and helplessly.

No, this is not original insight, but it is important as evidence of creating the (truthful) narrative that it was Obama's failure to be progressively bold on the stimulus that has doomed the Dems. For the record, the inadequacy of the stimulus was an issue in real time, as this January 7, 2009 John Harwood interview with then President-elect Obama makes clear:

HARWOOD: If it's correct that, as your aides have said, the danger is doing too little rather than doing too much [. . .] why stop at $775 billion? Why not go to the $1.2 trillion that some economists have recommended? Is that because you think that the political figure of a trillion dollars is too politically charged to get over? Is it because you think more spending would be pork rather than stimulus? Or do you think you've figured out exactly the right amount of stimulus that's needed?

Pres.-elect OBAMA: [. . .] We've seen ranges from 800 to 1.3 trillion and our attitude was that given the legislative process, if we start towards the low end of that, we'll see how it develops.

(Emphasis supplied.) This failure is on the White House and its centrists. This political debacle is theirs.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 03, 2010 (boomark / email).