EDITORIAL
Published: August 16, 2011
Faced with a divided Congress and an economy in desperate straits, President Obama tried bargaining with Republicans, he tried adopting some of their ideas and he pleaded with them for reasonable policies to help stave off disaster. For his efforts, he got nothing but a cold shoulder and the country got a credit downgrade.
Related
Editorial: Fight for a Jobs Agenda (August 17, 2011)
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
Now, on a bus tour in the Midwest, he is bitterly pointing the finger at his opponents for their refusal to consider any new revenues to tackle the deficit and their insistence on deep near-term spending cuts that will only cause more economic pain. His anger is long overdue. But it would be much more effective if he combined it with strong ideas of his own for how to fix the economy, rather than the thin agenda he is now promoting.
Fearing the real possibility of a default (something that never seemed to concern the Republicans), the president stayed largely mild-mannered through the whole debt-ceiling hostage ordeal. He even praised the bill that emerged, even though it cut spending excessively at a time when the fragile economy can’t afford it.
But on a factory trip last week and again on his tour of Iowa and Illinois, he was far more candid. He accurately referred to the “debt-ceiling debacle” and pointed out that the resulting downgrade was an assessment that Congress cannot make necessary compromises. “We’ve got the kind of partisan brinksmanship that is willing to put party ahead of country,” he said.
He left no doubt of his target when he noted that Speaker John Boehner walked away from a more balanced deficit-cutting deal and that, in last week’s debate, the Republican presidential contenders who participated unanimously rejected the possibility of a deal that cut spending 10 times as much as it raised taxes. “What that tells me is, O.K., you’ve gotten to the point where you’re just thinking about politics. You’re not thinking about common sense.”
Mr. Obama has proposed a series of small-bore measures to reduce the jobless rate, chosen in the hopes that they are so obvious that even House Republicans would consider going along with them.
That was a mirage, of course. Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, dismissed the idea of extending the payroll tax cut as “sugar-high economics,” and others in the House said it was too piecemeal.
When Republicans reject even tax cuts, something else is going on, and Mr. Obama identified it on Monday. “There are some folks in Congress who think that doing something in cooperation with me or this White House, that that somehow is bad politics,” he said. It is, in fact, entirely about politics.
He also pushed back against the incessant government bashing by Representative Michele Bachmann and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. While Mr. Perry even accused the Federal Reserve of treason for increasing the money supply — and shamefully threatened its chairman, Ben Bernanke, saying “we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas” if he does so again — Mr. Obama said government is hardly broken. It houses people during emergencies, he noted, fights fires and crime, and (to Mr. Perry’s annoyance) sends out pension checks.
That argument and that contrast would be much easier to make if Mr. Obama came up with policies big enough to match his newfound anger — and big enough to get the economy growing again.
No comments:
Post a Comment