Tag: Barack Obama

His explanation for how the credit crunch hits average Americans — tracking the dollars — should make it clearer why fixing banking is important. (From NY Times)

You see, the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy. The ability to get a loan is how you finance the purchase of everything from a home to a car to a college education; how stores stock their shelves, farms buy equipment, and businesses make payroll.

But credit has stopped flowing the way it should. Too many bad loans from the housing crisis have made their way onto the books of too many banks. With so much debt and so little confidence, these banks are now fearful of lending out any more money to households, to businesses, or to each other. When there is no lending, families can’t afford to buy homes or cars. So businesses are forced to make layoffs. Our economy suffers even more, and credit dries up even further.

That is why this administration is moving swiftly and aggressively to break this destructive cycle, restore confidence, and re-start lending.

The talking heads have a very different sense of what the president has been up to than the people in the trenches, the workers and homeowners dealing with the economic fallout. On both ABC and CBS, for instance, they painted a picture of an American public skeptical of the Obama program — when the polling shows a very different story.

The ABC/Washington Post poll issued today, for instance, showed large majorities backing the Obama stimulus package and saying it is likely to make things better (64 percent support it, 58 percent believe it will help and 62 percent believe it will help locally, while just a quarter say it will make things worse).

Another ABC/Washington Post poll found that about two thirds of Americans support the president’s plans to “75 billion dollars to provide refinancing assistance to homeowners to help them avoid foreclosure on their mortgages” — even with the alleged populist wildfire started by a rant on CNBC.

Other polls have given the president a 60 percent approval rating with most Americans saying they trust his handling of the economy.

So, the job tonight is not to convince the American people to trust him, but to explain to Americans exactly what to expect as we move forward, to not raise expectations and push for wide-ranging reforms — new regulations of the economy (banks in particular), promotion of new technologies, etc.

The bigfoot media is going to call this a defeat for the president, which is true. But they are going to focus on the wrong aspect of it, tying Judd Gregg to the other failed cabinet appointees. That, of course, is just inside baseball.

What makes this important is that it should have been obvious it was going to happen — if not now then at some point in the future. Gregg is a conservative Republican; Obama a relatively liberal Democrat. They share little in terms of political philosophy and were bound to come to loggerheads.

Consider this from Chris Cillizza’s The Fix on washingtonpost.com:

“It became clear to me to me that it would be very difficult day in and day out to serve in this Cabinet,” Gregg said in a press conference late Thursday. He added that in the days since he was nominated he realized that to be “part of a team but not 100 percent with the team” was an untenable position.

In his written statement, Gregg cited recent developments regarding the economic stimulus package and the decision to have the next census director report directly to senior White House officials as evidence that he and President Obama were too different ideologically for the pairing to work. “This was simply a bridge too far for me,” Gregg said of his decision.

No kidding? David Sirota, writing about the nomination on Feb. 3 on Open Left, summed up Gregg’s utter incompatibility with the Obama administration. While he didn’t anticipate his quick withdrawal, he did point out the basic pitfalls:

As I said, Gregg is the guy who voted for almost every single corporate-written trade policy in the last generation. He’s a guy who took to his state’s largest paper to deride efforts to reform the proposed Colombia Free Trade Agreement (that Obama says he opposes) – an agreement that includes no labor, human rights or environmental provisions, and would reward a right-wing government that colludes to execute union leaders.

In a very real sense, the appointment of Gregg is the equivalent of the Bush administration hiring people to government offices they had previously worked to destroy. Gregg not only voted to eliminate the Commerce Department he now heads, he will run the trade enforcement agency he has worked to undermine.

Had Obama traded the Commerce slot for a Democratic senator, there might have been a case that the Gregg appointment was understandable – even in the context of trade. You could have argued that with another Democratic vote in the Senate, it would have been that much easier to pass new fair trade reforms. But the fact that that’s not happening as part of the deal, means the Gregg appointment is just a straight-up sell out on all the issues that Commerce oversees – trade being one of the biggest. The idea that there’s no one better than a radical free trader to head up the Commerce Department in the administration of a president who campaigned against free trade is preposterous.

The problem here is not a pattern of withdrawals. Rather, it is that the Gregg appointment, like too many other things the new president has done, showed Obama to be more committed to a squishy bipartisanism than progressive policy goals.

So, as he goes back to the drawing board on Commerce, let’s hope he considers bringing in someone with whom he has some common understanding.

You know what happens when you stand in the middle of the road, don’t you? You get run over. Someone should warn President Barack Obama that there is a truck barreling down on him and it’s time to abandon the center.

Perhaps, he’ll listen to E.J. Dionne Jr. on this if he won’t listen to anyone else.