The White House has its own blog.
For me, a longtime blogger and the online editor for the Packet Group, I’m pleased to see a presidential administration would reach out to the public in this way. The blog, of course, is nothing more than a real-time public relations devise, but it does offer another avenue through which to follow what is going on in the administration.
I’ve added the feed to the sidebar.
Paul Krugman on the unstimulating stimulus package:
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?
A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.
Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.
Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.
The centrists, however, are only partly at fault. President Barack Obama has earned his share of the blame by trying to be all things to all people — including those who wanted nothing to do with him whatsoever. So rather than being bold, Krugman notes, and pushing “a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate,” he has “offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts.”
The reason?
Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.
The debate reminded me of something I learned while working retail — I managed a tuxedo shop — in my early 20s: Never undersell a potential customer. If a customer were to come in looking for a tux, we were taught to put him in the most expensive one in the store. Let him direct you downward. If you start with the cheap suit, you’ll never get him in the more expensive ones, no matter how much nicer they might be.
The same goes for contract negotiations, selling a house or a car, etc. Always ask for more than you expect to get. If you put your best price on the table, you have no room for negotiations and you will have no choice but to take less than you might otherwise have received.
President Obama failed to follow this basic rule of negotiations and sales. His original plan was compromised before he sent it to Capitol Hill, leaving him with nowhere to go during negotiations — especially with a recalcitrant Republican minority in the Senate having just enough votes to filibuster his plan.
The result was a stalemate in the Senate that left Obama turning to a handful of centrists.
So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small.
Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself.
http://www.politicaliq.com/dbox4_distributed.swf
Does this quote, from President Barack Obama, signal that we have an adult in the White House?
“I’ve got to own up to my mistake, which is that ultimately it’s important for this administration to send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with NBC News. “You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes.”
I mean, admitting when you err is, well, one of those things that separates the well-adjusted and mature adult from the juveniles of this world.
(Of course, we will have to see if the president learns anything from this….)
I have this sense, as week two of the Obama administration comes to a close, that the two central essences of then-candidate Barack Obama are at war in President Obama.
Obama, based on his own words, is a liberal, a man with progressive instincts who views government as a positive force. But, as his bland campaign tome The Audacity of Hope demonstrated, he also seeks to be a conciliator, “a uniter not a divider,” to borrow George W. Bush’s empty phrase.
We have a massive, progressive stimulus plan that features modernization of the electric grid, mass transit, new schools, green techologies and a rebuilt safety net. And we have concessions, a willingness by the Democrat called by Republicans during the campaign the “most liberal candidate in history.”
Concessions — like conservative Judd Gregg for commerce, like expanded tax cuts in the stimulus, like solid programs being removed.
Rachel Maddow on her show tonight had a graphic behind her that said, “They’re Just Not that Into You.” The message: Enough. President Obama, the GOP will not follow you down the stimulus path and that is OK. Let them vote no and remain lost in the wilderness. Let them show themselves as the impediments that they are.
I am fearful, however, that the administration’s conciliatory approach will win out, at great cost to his program.
If achieving bipartisanship takes priority over the actual content of policy, Republicans are handed a powerful weapon. In theory, they can keep moving the bipartisan bar indefinitely. And each concession to their sensibilities threatens the solidarity in the president’s own camp.
That’s why last week’s unanimous House Republican opposition to the stimulus plan was so important. For the most part, the Republicans escaped attack for rank partisanship. Instead, what should have been hailed as an administration victory was cast in large parts of the media as a kind of defeat: Obama had placed a heavy emphasis on bipartisanship, and he failed to achieve it.
The goal, however, is not some squishy bipartisanship but an effect stimulus that gets the economy moving, catches those falling and leaves us with an improved America down the road. Dionne, again:
The real test is whether Obama will fight for a stimulus bill that achieves some of his larger objectives. The aspects of the House bill that Republicans and conservative commentators have so eviscerated are the very ones that take substantial steps toward the president’s own priorities.
Obama placed a heavy bet during his campaign on a promise to reform the heath-care system. To the great consternation of conservatives, the House stimulus bill takes big steps toward broadening the number of Americans government would help to obtain health insurance. Will those provisions be protected in the final bill?
The president has spoken passionately about the inadequacy of our schools and the increasing difficulty that young Americans are having paying for higher education. The House stimulus bill includes a lot of education money. Will students be thrown overboard in pursuit of a nebulous cross-party comity?
I finally got around to listen to a podcast of Bill Moyers’ Journal from this past weekend and thought this exchange with Princeton University professor, Melissa Harris-Lacewll, was interesting and explained a lot about what will need to happen if progressives are to have influence over an Obama administration:
BILL MOYERS: You mentioned policy ills. And this gets me to the question of governance. So what do you, as progressives, as liberals, what do you expect of him that will fulfill your hopes for him, beyond the symbolism into the actual world of policy and decision making?
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: One of the images I’ve been using as we’ve been going around the country trying to place the King holiday in the context of a new Obama era is I’ve been using the image, iconic image of Barack Obama excuse me. Ah! Of Martin Luther King…
BILL MOYERS: There you go.
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Right. Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson together in the White House. And I say to people, okay, where’s — if you can superimpose Barack Obama’s face onto one of these two characters, onto whose face would you project it? And most people say, “Oh, well, King.” And I say, “No, no, no, no. Barack Obama’s LBJ in this picture.”
We’ve elected him to the U.S. presidency. So the missing image is who will play the role of King? Because, in fact, the president needs Kings. I actually think it’s plural. It’s not a single King. But the myth-
BILL MOYERS: You mean that they need agitators out there-
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: That’s-
BILL MOYERS: -who are pressing them to do the right thing-
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: That’s exactly right.
BILL MOYERS: -as Lyndon Johnson said to Martin Luther King — go out there and make it possible for me to do the right thing.
Basically, it comes down to the idea that it is the people in this democracy who are responsible for pushing their elected representatives to act. That’s why I chafe at the use of the word leader when referring to the president and Congress. They must show leadership, I guess, but it is more important that they follow the imperatives laid down by the masses.
Hank Kalet 