Reading Fallows's "Obama, Explained"
There is one paragraph in James Fallows's "Obama, Explained" that I find very odd--not so much for what it says as for the fact that it is not followed by what seems to me the obvious next passage.
What Fallows writes:
Rahm Emanuel told me that within a month of Obama’s election, but still another month before he took office, “the respectable range for how much stimulus you would need jumped from $400 billion to $800 billion.” In retrospect it should have been larger—but, Emanuel says, “in the Congress and the opinion pages, the line between ‘prudent’ and ‘crazy spendthrift’ was $800 billion. A dollar less, and you were a statesman. A dollar more, you were irresponsible.” The three Republicans who voted for the stimulus bill—Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and about-to-be-Democrat Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania—all complained that it was far too large, as did Jim Webb and many other Democrats...
Next should have been this natural rebuttal:
But an administration that seriously believed the economy needs a greater boost and finds itself hobbled by the process of congressional normal order would have made other adjustments. Its decisions about who to nominate for the Federal Reserve and how hard to push for their confirmation--or whether to short-circuit confirmation in the short run via recess appointments--would have been powerfully informed by the desire to use Federal Reserve quantitative easing and other non-standard monetary policies to fill in the gaps. And an administration that believes that it must step cautiously on Federal Reserve appointments, lest it shock confidence in some way, the Treasury's TARP authority and the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are arms of the government enable Treasury action to substitute for the missing monetary and fiscal boosts.
Moreover, not just Collins, Snowe, Specter, and Webb but Nelson, Lincoln, and Lieberman are irrelevant if the White House pushes to use the Reconciliation process as it stood in November 2008 as the legislative vehicle for macroeconomic policy.
Last, once you recognize that you have a jobless recovery, you sound the alarm. You do not keep claiming that the Recovery Program was the right size and that the recovery is proceeding fine up to and beyond the election of 2010.
But that rebuttal is missing.
It is, to my mind, the failure of Obama in early 2009 to set up the game board so that he could still take macroeconomic policy actions in 2010 and 2011 should the rapid recovery he expected not come to pass that is his greatest unforced policy error. And I find it difficult to understand how Fallows can ignore this issue entirely.
And note that he is not alone. Here is Elizabeth Drew twittering me this morning:
Twitter / @ElizabethDrewOH: @delong Dem leaders on Cap ...: @delong Dem leaders on Capitol Hill told White House not propose stimulus fig that even suggests $1 trillion. Said number wd grow on Hill.
That the Obama administration did all that it could because it was constrained by the congressional process seems to me to be willfully blind to 3/4 of the policy actions Obama could have taken to give the economy a boost.
And this to my mind misreading of the record makes me doubt Fallows's major thesis:
[T]he test for presidents is not where they begin but how fast they learn and where they end up. Not even FDR was FDR at the start. The evidence is that Obama is learning, fast, to use the tools of office... [...] Obama has shown the main trait we can hope for in a president—an ability to grow and adapt—and that the reason to oppose his reelection would be disagreement with his goals, not that he proved unable to rise to the job. As time has gone on, he has given increasing evidence that the skills he displayed in the campaign were not purely a fluke...
Both economic policy and legislative strategy look to me to have been worse in 2011 than in 2010, and worse in 2010 than in 2009.
UPDATE: DELONG SMACKDOWN WATCH: Extremely well-informed sources assure me that there is no way that either of the necessary committee chairs would have allowed what they would have regarded as "abuse" of the Reconciliation process to pass a fiscal boost through Reconciliation in the spring of 2009. The open question is whether a 50-218-2 committee chair-president coalition could have been assembled if you had tied "entitlement reform"--standby tax increases and Medicare growth-rate spending cuts if the deficit remained large after 2015--to the Recovery Act as a single Reconciliation package. And that I do not know and probably will never know...
