Two Disturbing Signs From Obama
OK it’s been a couple of months and the nation’s ills haven’t been fixed yet, so I feel like complaining about all the bad decisions Obama is making. Well actually I think the vast majority of things aren’t his fault — even if he does make bad economic or foreign policy decisions they are accepted wisdom and he feels his hands are tied, so it’s expected. I supported him from the beginning and was excited about his candidacy, but I saw those sorts of decisions coming from a mile away. The real reason why I supported Obama was how I thought he would react once the economic (and/or foreign) crisis gets incredibly bad and accepted wisdom is being openly challenged. That’s when Obama will make or break it in my eyes.
But that said, there are a couple of things that he is doing I have a huge problem with. These things are fully in his control and are antithetical to his projected image and governing philosophy he said he’d have. I understand there are rationalizations for all these things, but he is supposed to be better than that, and I hope for the sakes of temporarily un-cynical people everywhere he reverses these things soon.
The details are covered by Glenn Greenwald, and I’ll just let him handle them.
1) When it comes to executive power, Obama is merely paying lip service to renouncing some of the extreme positions of the Bush Administration. Whether it’s “enemy combatants” at Bagram, the continuance of “state secrets” positions about eavesdropping or the use of signing statements in extreme ways, Obama has so far continued to thwart the spirit of international law, public inquiry and separation of powers.
2) Under a cloak of anonymity, Administration officials are using the press to frame debate and smear opponents. This is something that I know happened a lot under Clinton too, and the worst examples seem to revolve around Treasury issues. Lawrence Summers has been accused of being very scummy, and I’m not sure about Geithner, but the manipulation and spin by the powers that be seem to be in full force. I thought that the press had learned a lesson with that Bush fellow not to use anonymous sourcing anymore. [As a side note, if people are having to defend Dodd against unfounded claims of being in the financial firms' pockets, then something is seriously wrong.] This issue was also noted by Kathy as I was crafting this post.
While I expect Obama to make policy decisions I don’t agree with, these two areas are signs of an operational governing philosophy that is directly contradictory with what he promised to stand for. That philosophy is the source of his political power, and will become increasingly important if the economy fails to respond to government intervention (which I believe it will) or we have a foreign policy challenge.
Update: I forgot one that commenter DaGoat pointed out. “I also feel his use of pessimistic projections to justify the stimulus and using optimistic predictions to project the deficit was devious and definitely not the Obama he ran as.” I am not so sure that his projections to justify the stimulus were that pessimistic or out of line with the deficit projections. In fact from what I’ve read they dovetail fairly nicely. However, his projections for growth are completely insane. There is no way we are going back to 3.5%+ growth for a long time in an indebted economy, and more realistic projections from economic optimists I’ve read (recession ends by the end of the year) are for 1.5%-2% for the next few years. That latter growth rate is the average value for major industrialized countries, so it is definitely the upper limit of what I think is realistic, and yet 40-50% less growth than the Administration projected. Their projections are a huge disservice to the long term budgeting for the country.
Update 2: About the “bait and switch” projections, I think I figured out what people are referring to, and address it in the comments.
23 Responses to “Two Disturbing Signs From Obama”
Welcome to Washington DC.
; )
I'm also pretty unhappy that all the problems haven't been solved. It's hard to know if anything is working yet. But it's fair to complain.
It's been a piece of conventional wisdom that the Treasury Department should be run by, I don't know what to call them, technocrats, I guess. Unfortunately, it's financial technocrats who got us in this mess. I wonder if we wouldn't be better off with–possibly NSFW!–a politican. Someone who has successfully run for an office like governor or senator might have more useful practical experience than people who are good at getting themselves appointed to jobs.
And seriously, if the media wants to use unnamed sources, that's their call–but maybe they could take the responsibility for confirming or disproving whatever [dis]information they are putting out.
As for signing statements, they have some practical uses when the Congress won't pass anything except bills full of everything all at once. Congress also needs to step up to its role in the separation of powers.
And, contra Greenwald, I do think it's too early to tell if Obama is just going to continue the power-grabbing policies of Bush. But I would be very unhappy if he did that. So I think it's fair to criticize Obama because I agree with Greenwald when he says this: “Rational people are capable of seeing more than these two options: Obama should not yet be criticized and Obama is the equivalent of Bush.”
[...] somewhat left of center, two from the Moderate Voice … one piece having buyers remorse and another piece which doesn’t seem to understand Mr Limbaugh is a government official and [...]
It's the end of the world as we know it.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638…
And I feel fine.
Kudos on your honesty, Mikkel.
From where I sit, there are a few more concerns along those same lines. The attempt to put Census under WH control certainly didn't sit well with me, and the complaint that Byrd made about all of the czars is something to watch, I think. Even from the standpoint of appearance of impropriety, you'd think that Obama would see how people opposed Cheney's claims of privelege and shielding from Congressional oversight and try to avoid even the appearance of that sort of thing.
And one more manner in which I think Obama is governing like Bush is the use of crisismongering in lieu of real debate. He's even used the aura of crisis to justify breaking some of his promises on transparency, like posting bills online for 48 hours (hell, I'd be happy if at least the people voting on the bills had had that length of time to read the thing.)
Agree.
How much time does it take to fix a couple of little problems created and left by the previous administration?
I'll give Obama a couple more days, then I'll join the opposition, too.
The thing is, DE, we're not talking about whether or not he's fixed the problems- we're discussing whether or not he is meeting his promises about HOW things get done. Those aren't things that take time to fix- they just take actual commitment to the principles.
Since the MSM is totaly in the bag for Obama his actual performance does not matter. The Democratic party will win more seats in 2010 and President Obama will win re-election in a landslide in 2012.
The only question for America is what are the long term implications of the U.S. becomng a one party state with a hard movement to the left. Will the U.S. private sector economy be able to produce the wealth to sustain the coming welfare state? What will the affects of the welfare state be one individual behavior? Can the U.S. maintain open borders while expanding government entitlements?
It almost seems like a conditioned response for Democrats to counter criticism of Obama with criticism of Bush. Obama has to be judged on his own actions and results.
As far as the two criticisms in the original article I agree with CStanley in that I have more trouble with Obama's claims of a crisis to justify every action. I also feel his use of pessimistic projections to justify the stimulus and using optimistic predictions to project the deficit was devious and definitely not the Obama he ran as.
Oh, thanks for adding that part about shifting the projections to suit his agenda in each case, DaGoat. I meant to add that and to note that this too is not unlike the Bush adminstration using rosy glasses to plan the Iraq invasion (in terms of the cost in dollars and manpower it would take) while also projecting doom and gloom if we didn't invade.
And also, on economics, both men use their philosophy of economics to justify not making real sacrifices- Bush believed that revenues would go up with supply side economics and Obama believes that the economy will revive with Keynesianism. In neither case does there seem to be enough rational questioning of those dogmatic views.
It's unrealistic to expect Obama to have fixed the economy, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and restored the rule of law in 3 months. We've had basically 30 years of government that ignored or exacerbated these crises that Obama has now been tasked with fixing. He inherited a huge national deficit, a broken health care system, an economy in the middle of the biggest economic downturn in at least 50 years, two wars that seem unwinnable, and a country that has exhausted its good will and moral influence around the world. If he can adequately address even half of these things in 3 years, let alone 3 months, we should all be extremely grateful.
However, as Greenwald points out, he has taken actions which affirm the Bush administrations view of limitless executive power. On these matters, Obama should be vehemently opposed.
George, I read a proposal about signing statements somewhere that said that the President should always try to get Congress to take out the parts he feels are unconstitutional, but in cases that doesn't happen, the Supreme Court should have fasttrack hearings about it. It suggested that Congress should pass a bill that authorizes them and/or the President to bring points of contention to the Supreme Court. I have no idea how feasible that is legally, but it sounds like a good idea at least. The idea would be that then the President could use signing statements but they would be resolved within a few months.
I think the media's primary role is to be skeptical and borderline antagonistic towards Power. If there is an anonymous source that is anonymous for fear of retribution from those in charge then that's fine…we wouldn't have much investigative reporting without whistleblowing. When they anonymously source those that are already in positions of power to further the agenda, that's complicity in letting them operate without repercussions.
As for the technocrat/politician point, it is difficult to generalize. I feel mainstream economics has lots of problems with it, you've read about them for a long time, and the problem is that the technocrats are wrong about the fundamental nature of interventions, but a politician wouldn't be much better. It is widespread academic failure that is one of the big problems in this instance. Secondly, the technocrats themselves had a plan for how to combat events like this and they are deviating from them because they are defaulting to the most politically feasible position. I don't think that the Treasury is doing exactly what it envisioned and it's failing, they are just making stuff up because what they envisioned couldn't be done politically.
Neither of those things would be solved by having it be more political. That said, there needs to be tons more accountability and transparency in exactly what is going on, right now decisions are made and details kept secret.
It's unrealistic to expect Obama to have fixed the economy, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and restored the rule of law in 3 months.
It's also not the topic of the thread. Specific actions and statements by Obama are being criticized. As far as I can tell no one in this thread is saying Obama should have accomplished the things you mentioned.
But since you bring it up I think he should be expected to adequately address at least half of those things within 3 years. Not completely reverse, but address.
I see the shifting-projections-thing has made it to the front page. Down here in the comments it had some unsourced numbers attached to it. Any provenance to support any of them?
I hope it's not offensive for me to ask. I'm not saying anyone is wrong. I'm just saying that's a new one for me.
I also think I failed to make my point on the technocrat/politician thing clear. My point was supposed to be that the technocrats are terrible at explaining themselves to the general public. It's possible that this AIG bonus scandal will make transparency more desirable even to politicians, who, because they face voters, will be held accountable. Or so I hope.
I'm not sure what this “shifting” that is being referred to is about, as the stimulus projections I read only looked at the next couple of years and were in line with the budget projections. This is a thing about how rosy those are though. I think even those private forecasts are way too optimistic.
Well, I consider it a shift if you use realistic estimates in one case (when that suited the political need to stress the direness of the situation) and then change to the rosy forecast when that better suits the need to project a more reasonable deficit (thus deflating some of the criticism of the spending.)
Do you have a link to what you're referring to though? Like I said, the stimulus projections I read were only out to a few years and the primary complaint about that was both the non-stimulus and stimulus projections were too optimistic. They projected unemployment would peak at about 9.8% without stimulus and 8.8% with it, but it's going to be 8.8% in only a few months…ditto the GDP decline.
Oh, I see what you are asking now. But no, I can't think of where to pull a link from- I guess CBO, but as I recall their numbers were confusing because they were projecting changes in GDP from baseline and then referring you to other reports where they projected baseline GDP without a stimulus- so I don't think I can go back through all of it at the moment.
I could be wrong, but my impression was that the projections were a lot more bleak but then suddenly didn't sound so bad with the budget projections. It could be that this was mostly a change in rhetoric, not the actual numerical assumptions that were being used.
I think I know what you're referring to but those are actually different things. What the CBO office talked about was the “output gap” or the difference between the GDP and theoretical “fully employed,” trend continuation GDP. I am very skeptical of such a concept in general, and incredulous about it with the amount of debt the country already has, but in any case, that trendline is the 2% per annum or so that I referred to above.
Obviously if the economy just stays flat for a year the gap will be 2%, and since they are expecting a peak to tough GDP decline of 2.5% or so with the stimulus (I think it was 5% without) then that becomes a very large gap that would take many years to fill regardless. That is what looked bad and why Krugman was saying we need a $2 trillion stimulus, but it is a separate issue. The inflation adjusted growth numbers they were looking at were the same between the two reports, I'm almost certain.
OK, well if that's the case then I agree with you that both sets of assumptions were overly optimistic- but I'll stand by my related complaint that the rhetoric switched from doom and gloom to “It's never as bad as they say it is.”
My understanding was the CBO gave a range of projections, ie best case scenario to worst case scenario. In the articles I read Obama was using the more negative projections in pushing for the stimulus, the more positive while formulating his budget and trying to make the projected deficit look smaller. I don't read the far-right blogs so no it wasn't coming from there.
But now I have to admit I can't find a good link to support that and it's certainly reasonable to require one. I know I read it (and it sounds like CStanley read something similar) but I can't find it. i do agree with CStanley that Obama's tone has changed significantly from the stimulus to the budget but I would like to also be able to give some hard numbers as well.
I feel everyone's pain about finding some numbers. You'd think it would be easy, or, at least possible. Not so much, as a matter of fact.
Someone called the Econbrowser has a footnoted post with two colorful charts. The first lays out several GDP predictions, including the Administration's. Some variation, but mostly reasonably aligned.
The Econobrowser dude does provide several links to news stories reporting on the supposed rosiness of the Administration's forecast, including one from Bloomberg headlined “Obama’s Deficit Plans May Use Optimistic Forecasts “. I added a little emphasis to show that the Bloomberg media organization apparently was unable to determine if the forecast was, in fact, optimistic. There's your expert financial media for you!!
The second, smaller colorful chart illustrates two possible outcomes predicted by the CBO, one high, one low. They are explained by a third black-and-white chart as the CBO's predictions about the effects of the stimulus. It actually shows three lines: good effects, poor effects, and the effect of no stimulus at all.
I would guess, though, that any change in rhetoric is the result of early fears that there might be nothing to help the economy before the stimulus was passed, and the subsequent sense that having passed a stimulus was a good thing that was going to help the economy.
The Econbrowser also included a link to a short piece by the Director of the Budget saying there wasn't much difference between the CBO and White House estimates. Judge for yourselves about that, but I'd say he was right. Certainly, though, it's part of a sales job–all the more reason for sunnier rhetoric. And they're all just forecasts, which means they're guesses, however educated, and could be wrong.
The Econbrowser seems to have good sourcing, with lots of links.
A small article from Marketwatch indicates the CBO projects 1.5% GDP growth and unemployment above 9% for 2010.