The New Republic

The way I frame it is that Obama did not run as a crisis president (the financial collapse occurred very late in the campaign) and, not surprisingly, has not governed as a crisis president; we should have known something was amiss when, upon the financial collapse and the ensuing precipitous decline in the economy in late 2008, Obama kept the same team of advisors, including economic advisors, he had selected previously, as though nothing had changed. And who can forget all that talk in 2009 about green shoots and imminent recovery. Obama could have been one of our great presidents, the transformative president he wanted to be, it's just that he was elected at the wrong moment in history. This isn't a criticism of Obama, for he has done better than the Republican alternative, but an acknowledgment of reality. And let's not blame the sniping Republicans; Obama's woes in that respect are nothing compared to Washington's, whose own cabinet (Jefferson and Madison especially) attempted to undermine him at every turn.

- rayward

November 17, 2011 at 6:56am

Galston nails it, although I would add that Obama should have also listened to then FDIC chair Sheila Bair about the housing crisis. I am actually surprised that Geithner had as much sense as revealed in this early exchange. Rayward: what no one except me noticed was that candidate Obama had zero interest in the Economy - my application, in March 2008, to create a MyBO Group on the Economy was denied by the MyBO algorithmm because Economy was not an official category for an Issues Group. At the time, there were more than 10,000 MyBO groups, and more than 2,000 were on Iraq. In May, 2008, once Obama knew he had the delegates, he picked up a team of Rubins from the Clintons, with a kid named Jason Furman as the new chief economic advisor. Meanwhile McCain had Douglas Holz-Eakin and Mark Zandi, but never used them effectively, even though whenever I saw Holz-Eakin v Furman on cable, it was clear that Furman was clueless. "Would he have figured out how to end the Bush tax cuts as part of comprehensive tax reform? ..." Truly, the biggest lost opportunity to create an enduring Democratic majority...that might have then been able to solve the health care dilemma in a second term. Instead, Pelosi-Obama-Reid will be remembered for being worse than Hoover...Pelosi turned into a bizarro-world Tom DeLay.

- K2K

November 17, 2011 at 10:16am

Transformative presidents are presidents who engage the American people in transforming the nation. And it seems that for all of his rhetoric about "Yes we can" - Obama never imagined mobilizing Americans to make the United States freer, more equal, and more democratic. And sadly, the AFL-CIO was too keen on supporting him against the right to try to push him publicly. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/sep/03/tobefranklin http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/09/28/fdrs-forgotten-freedoms.html http://www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=293 http://www.newdeal20.org/2011/08/17/washington-lincoln-and-fdr-were-great-presidents-and-great-radicals-55403/

- hkaye

November 17, 2011 at 10:58am

Oh, for Pete's sake. Obama was right on the money that being the President who prevented the Second Great Depression would not be enough for him -- because that's excactly what happened, and he got rewarded with a mid-term Republican sweep, an intransigent Republican House and ever-filibustering Senators and approval ratings in the mid-40's. Just because your economic policies kept large sectors of the American economy from cratering and unemployment in the 9-10% range versus the 15-20% range doesn't mean that the voters will thank you for it -- they will simply see 9-10% unemployment as unacceptably high and blame you as the incumbent. Which is exactly what they are doing. If Obama's sole domestic policy success was keeping unemployment at 9% (or even 8%) while having no health care reform, no Dodd-Frank and none of his other legislative accomplishments, do you really think voters would be materially more excited about his Presidency? Maybe in unemployment was down to 7%, but otherwise for every moderate voter who sees Obama as a good guy who tried hard to prevent an economic meltdown you would have a thoroughly depressed liberal voter who saw the wasted opportunity to do anything about health care, financial regulation, student loans or the environment. Which is to say, about the same thing you see today. Oh, and the line about the infrastructure bank is just a lapse into parody. Obama has already proposed the goddamn infrastructure bank. Republicans are filibustering because it was proposed by Obama. Just like they filibuster every other piece of legislation proposed by him these days.

- wildboy

November 17, 2011 at 12:24pm

While the former was successful and the latter failed, both initiatives no doubt measurably contributed to the Democrats’ 2010 mid-term debacle. Nice fact free assertion. Nothing about unemployment spiking up to 10% had anything to do with it. And cap and trade? Really? You can ask 100 people about that and 99 won't know what the hell that is, but sure, that is what caused Democrats to lose. And all of these silly what ifs. The stimulus was done in April of 2009, long before Health care and the administration misjudged how deep the recession was, partly because of inaccurate reporting at the time. The initial stimulus was not big enough, if it had been bigger we would be better off now employment wise but likely be in the exact same place politically. Galston is ignoring that Democrats only held a filibuster proof majority for a very short time, Franken was held up for 6 months and Specter was a Republican, when they both gave Democrats a 60 seat majority Democrats had to contend with Lieberman and Nelson. Then, of course, Kennedy died and Mass. was lost and with it the filibuster. Obama made mistakes but even if he had a mistake less administration I am sure we would be where we are politically.

- blackton

November 17, 2011 at 1:02pm

Wildboy and Blackton have it right. Gallston's piece is Monday-morning quarterbacking combined with revisionist history. Saying "it's not enough" isn't saying Geithner is wrong, isn't "instantly rejected", it's simply saying he's going to try to do more. And the stimulus they got was the most they could possibly get against intransigent Republicans and Blue-dog Democrats. And the ACA was critically important -- there's no other realistic way to control the out-of-control Health-Insurance costs. The Fox-News Tea-Party Koch-Brothers propaganda machine was going to trash Obama no matter what he tried, no matter what the results were. "What If" he had tried less? We'd have gotten less, that's all.

- AllanL5

November 17, 2011 at 1:25pm

If the majority of Americans end up voting against Obama because he didn't get our economy humming again in two years, after it suffered the second biggest crash in history, and which he was not in any way responsible for, then the majority of Americans deserve the fool they get to replace him. Unfortunately, a minority of Americans will have to endure the fool, too, like they did under Bush. Sometimes a representative government just doesn't work. But then, a non-representative government almost never works. I think the real reasons people will vote against Obama is that he is (1) a Democrat and (2) half-black. I'm sure his Republican replacement will get our economy smokin' hot by 2015. And I leave carrots out for the Easter Bunny.

- magboy47.

November 17, 2011 at 2:29pm

wow - still not comprehending that ACA Obamacare was the tipping point, and still is according to polling, that gave birth to the TEA Party? And that ACA is about extending health care insurance, with almost no impact on driving down costs? And that the employer mandates in ACA are a huge reason why companies are piling up profits instead of hiring? Massachusetts is proof. Someone needs to do a chronology of every time Obama & Pelosi said "pivoting to jobs" and then went back to ACA. And that the stimulus may indeed have been too small, but it was poorly designed by Pelosi & her committee chairs, based on their incomprehensible belief that high-speed rail spending in year 3 counted as stimulus...

- K2K

November 17, 2011 at 3:57pm

K2K, the teaparty had its origin in the Santelli rant on CNBC at the beginning of the Obama Presidency. And as the mandates are not due to come into affect until 2014 to state that employers are not hiring because in 3 years they will start to have to give their employers health care is a huge stretch. Most Americans get their health care from their employers, so by that logic there has always been a disincentive to hire employees. And if the American people are so effing stupid that they don't realize that the uninsured will just avail themselves of hospital emergency rooms, thereby passing the costs onto the companies that provide health insurance, then I say to hell with those companies that are free riders. Force the bastards into bankruptcy. Hell, I suppose Republicans would have defended slave owners use of slaves as a cost savings measure and that no way can we get rid of slavery as it would mean millions of blacks would then be unemployed and the poor slaveowner would become poor too.

- blackton

November 17, 2011 at 6:56pm

blackton: I stand corrected about the Santelli rant, but it was ObamaCare that really added momentum to the TEA Party in 2010. Remember Scott Brown, R, MA? I think it was New York cotton traders, somewhere near Wall Street :), who "defended slave owners use of slaves as a cost savings", leading to "...immediately preceding the American Civil War, Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood, widely considered the most corrupt in the city's history, proposed the secession of the city as a sovereign city-state to be called the Free City of Tri-Insula (Tri-Insula meaning "three islands" in Latin), and incorporating Manhattan, Long Island and Staten Island. In an address to the city's Common Council on January 6, 1861, Mayor Wood expressed a Copperhead sympathy with the threatened seceding states and a desire to maintain profitable cotton shipping, confidence that the city state would prosper on the import tariffs that then supplied 2/3 of the Federal revenues ..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_New_York Sorry for copying from wiki, but there are many other sources. And, unlike those Southern Democrats-now-Republicans, today's Democrats of New York City are direct descendants of the Fernando Wood era, although the corruption is now usually in the NY State Assembly and Senate - chomping on that Medicaid pie of New York is so tempting. I assume some of today's GOP are aware of the NY model for Medicaid, and that is what they do NOT want to be imposed on their states, which is also a big part of Obamacare - expansion of Medicad eligibility and required benefits applied to every state.

- K2K

November 17, 2011 at 8:32pm

Obama's main problem is not that he didn't settle for beating back another Great Depression. Nor was it that he worked on health care, cap-and-trade and other issues. Rather, he had a lousy triumvirate of top advisers in the persons of Emmanuel, Summers and most of all Geithner. They who steered him away from a plethora of policies that could have bolstered the economy far more and reined in Wall Street. Geithner in particular was part of the crew that brought us to the economic brink in 2008; after getting appointed, he has continued to kowtow to Wall Street and to offer lousy advice, to the detriment of Obama's political prospects and the country's economic well-being.

- Thunderroad

November 18, 2011 at 4:00am

Oh, give me a break. What's the use of what-if questions? The real question you're asking is, "What if we had known then what we do now?" Well, we didn't. Christina Romer thought the Recovery Act would bring down unemployment significantly; it didn't. That doesn't mean it was a failed stimulus--just because it merely stanched the bleeding, rather than fully healed the gash. What you're proposing is a pure counterfactual fantasy. Historical fiction. We have no way of knowing what course Obama's presidency would have taken, had he made different choices. Maybe he would have succeeded more in one area, and simply failed to meet expectations in another--and your ilk would criticize him unflinchingly for that hypothetical (and fictional) matter. If President Obama is a one-term president, it's in part because people on the left engaged in petulant armchair quarterbacking while the right-wing coalesced in opposition. This enabled congressional Republicans to obstruct and weaken Obama's policy initiatives further. Liberals got demoralized over the messiness of the legislative process--as well as over provisions left-wing bloggers repeatedly insisted Obama failed to achieve (public option, etc). And what happened? They stayed home in 2010 instead of voting, so the GOP could take the House. Not much room to legislate after that. And I realize that it's "cool"--and has been for some time--to think of President Obama as weak and ineffectual. And I also understand that many will deride my statement as blindly dismissive of blank and blank and blank policy failures of his. Maybe I am drinking the Kool-Aid. But it warms the cockles of my heart to think what the great liberal cynics will think when unscrupulous President Romney makes baldfaced political calculation after baldfaced political calculation. What will President Obama have done? He will have reformed our health care system, made an effort to address the unruly financial markets, ended DADT, reinvested in education and infrastructure, secured tax cuts and unemployment benefits for the middle class, killed Osama Bin Laden and dismantled Al Qaeda, overthrown Gaddafi without a single American troop on the ground, etc--and he will have done this, I might add, with almost zero Republican support, and constant criticism from the left. As far as I'm concerned, that's a great deal to accomplish.

- maxhencke

November 18, 2011 at 9:39am

Congratulations Mr. Galston: This is the MOST-READ in last 24 hours at RCP today. 11/18/2011 - 4:00am EDT | Thunderroad "...Geithner in particular was part of the crew that brought us to the economic brink in 2008; after getting appointed, he has continued to kowtow to Wall Street and to offer lousy advice, to the detriment of Obama's political prospects and the country's economic well-being." Spot on! No one ever held Geithner accountable for his timidity as NY Fed President with Lehman Brothers. The irony is that Obama has to hold Geithner hostage as SecTreas until the end of 2012 because I guess Obama knows he can not get anyone else confirmed, especially rumoured favorite Jon Corzine.

- K2K

November 18, 2011 at 11:29am

Corzine? I thought it was going to be Berlisconi. The real fuck-up was the usual fuck-up--rookie outsider President gets taken for a ride by his own party elders in Congress. The failure to split the Repubs by co-opting their useful ideas on healthcare reform (tort reform, more state control on insurance regulation, etc) and other major issues left O stuck with the Pelosi-Reid brand. With all due respect to blackie and K2K, in my view what really created the Tea Party was the wide-spread realization that the net result of the GW Bush administration was the most aggressive expansion of Big Government and the most comprehensive destruction of the economy since FDR and Hoover, respectively. O still has a path to victory by going post-partisan, IMHO.

- Robert Powell

November 19, 2011 at 12:12pm

Hello RP: well, maybe not Berlusconi, but Christine LaGarde would have been a better bet for Senate confirmation than Corzine :) "...rookie outsider President gets taken for a ride by his own party elders in Congress..." for sure, on the Stimulus and Obamacare. Further to my point on 2010 House wave being driven by Obamacare - and you have to click on the URL to read the detailed analysis of the 2010 electiion for the House - from The Weekly Standard today: "...The Republicans’ core problem isn’t that they’re struggling to win the blame game on the economy (though they are). It’s that they’ve forgotten to ride the wave that brought them here. Republicans didn’t get elected in 2010 because of voters’ dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ handling of the economy. They got elected because the Democrats openly and arrogantly ignored the voters’ will in passing the monstrosity that is Obamacare—and because Republicans stood firmly, resolutely, unflinchingly for Obamacare’s repeal. Let’s look at the evidence. Every House Republican incumbent voted against Obamacare, and every Republican challenger (to the best of my knowledge) was in favor of repeal. So, to see the voters’ response to Obamacare, we must look at the Democrats. ... [concluding] What should Republicans do? If Republicans want to show that they’re remotely as committed to eliminating Obamacare as Obama was in imposing it, there are plenty of actions they can take. Congressional Republicans can pass bills to repeal Obamacare’s CLASS (Community Living Assistance Services and Supports) Act and its grisly IPAB (Independent Payment Advisory Board)—and then follow that by once again passing full repeal legislation, this time in the midst of a presidential campaign. In addition, they can pass the replacement legislation for Obamacare that they promised voters they would deliver. Republican presidential candidates can emphasize that repealing Obamacare is by far the most important thing the next administration and Congress can do. They can detail why Obamacare is probably the worst piece of legislation in American history, while unveiling plans to replace it—plans that would lower health costs, end the tax code’s discrimination against the uninsured, and fund state-run community pools to help provide access to coverage for those with prohibitively expensive preexisting conditions. Beyond that, Republican presidential, congressional, and senatorial candidates would do well to reflect on, and perhaps reconsider, what the coming election is really all about. If Obamacare is one of the worst—maybe the worst—and most unpopular major pieces of legislation ever passed on these shores, and if its fate will likely be decided by the upcoming election (as it will), then why would Republicans say that the upcoming election is mostly about the economy? Obama knows he cannot win a referendum on Obamacare. His best hope is that Republicans will continue to join him in pretending that this will be a run-of-the-mill election centered around the economy, rather than a historic election in which the citizenry’s verdict will largely determine the future course of the nation." http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/it-s-obamacare-stupid_609226.html?nopager=1

- K2K

November 20, 2011 at 11:15am

Strong argument K2K. Thanks. I guess I've under-estimated the opposition to ACA because people seem to like its components taken on their own. Bad packaging by the Democrat's during their period of single-party rule. I believe a major impetus behind the formation of the Tea Party was disillusionment among people who thought they were voting for a conservative in Dubyah, and got a whopping dose of Big Government spending, debt, and bureaucratic encroachment. Initially they were pretty tough on Republican incumbents. Obamacare walked right into that one, being depicted as an outright government takeover, so became the most likely target to focus on. I think weeklystandard is right about O's "best hope". Of course, to make the recommended strategy work the Repubs would have to pass credible replacement legislation, something I'm not willing to bet they'll be able to do.

- Robert Powell

November 21, 2011 at 7:05am