Legal Commentary

The Only Poll That Matters Is On Election Day

By Big Tent Democrat

Paul Krugman writes about the topic de jour - why are Obama and Dems in political trouble? The answer is, as Krugman notes, as it always is, the economy. But Krugman repeats a point that has been made by him, by Matt Yglesias, by me and many others, that the best politics is good governance. And here is where Obama and the Democrats failed in the first hundred days of the Obama Administration - their policies were inadequate to the problem. Krugman explains:

The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True, senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it won its first big Congressional test.

In short, it looks as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion, focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on their actual impact on the economy.

The seeds of the Democrats' political problems next November were sown by their timid action in the first hundred days of the Obama Administration. The price will be high - probably the loss of the Congress. It may have been different if bolder economic policies had been enacted. The election day poll, the one that matters, would have been better for Dems.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 19, 2010 (boomark / email).