THE STASH SEPTEMBER 1, 2009
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I consider David Brooks one of the two-to-three best columnists in the business, and he's obviously warmly disposed toward Obama, so I doubt he intends to be uncharitable in today's column. But I think that's where he ends up nonetheless. Particularly this: "By force of circumstances and by design, the president has promoted one policy after another that increases spending and centralizes power in Washington."
Do Obama's policies--both enacted and proposed--centralize power in Washington? Of course. No one who's fired up a television or Internet connection these last eight months could disagree. But the question is: relative to what? In almost every case I can think of, the administration has opted for a less centralized approach to pursuring its goals than some obvious alternatives. Solving the bank crisis? Obama endorsed a convoluted asset-purchase plan rather than nationalization. Health care? True, the White House supports an exchange to cover people who don't get health care through their employers, and it prefers to see a public insurance option. But it wants to keep the employer-based system intact and shuns a single-payer plan, much less anything resembling a British-style government-run system. The environment? Obama supports cap-and-trade, which allows companies to distribute the burden of limiting carbon emissions amongst themselves according to which ones can do it most efficiently. The centralized alternative would have been a one-size-fits-all mandate from Washington.
All of these things do increase the role of government in the economy. But, once you concede that the problems need to be addressed, there isn't much of an alternative. And Obama's approaches are pretty scrupulous about not increasing that role more than necessary, which seems to be the whole conceit. Sure, you could do these things in marginally less centralized ways. But, as Brooks conedes, that probably won't matter PR-wise, since, "Voters often have only a fuzzy sense of what each individual proposal actually does." So the idea that there's some less centralized way of achieving Obama's goals that would be much more popular politically--which Brooks suggests--seems pretty unlikely to me. The problem, as Matthew Yglesias keeps pointing out, is that ambitious reform is hard. Our political system just isn't designed to enable it.
5 comments
"Do Obama's policies--both enacted and proposed--centralize power in Washington? Of course." No, they don't. This is where conservative critics and mainstream journalists who regularly call Obama "the most liberal president" get it wrong. Contra Brooks, little of what President Obama has done or proposed actually vests any new power in Washington. The stimulus and the various bailouts were all structured to minimize the amount of control Washington would have over corporate or private actions after the cash changed hands. Cap and trade is the maximally market-oriented, decentralized approach other than "do nothing about CO2," and even the public option in healthcare is intended as (depending on which of the president's proposals one looks at) either an independent public corporation akin to the Post Office, beyond political control, or a set of 50-plus state-level public agencies. That's pretty much the most de-centralized, least power-grabby set of national reforms proposed since Stephen Douglas ran for president. And, to top it off, again contra Brooks, Obama is engaging in and proposing less deficit spending than either George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. Simply put, to complain that President Obama is engaged in a program of political centralization or concentrating power in Washington or massive new government spending is to lie. The fact that everyone likes David Brooks doesn't make these falsehoods any more true when Brooks repeats them.
- rhubarbs
September 1, 2009 at 5:42pm
Two failures to load the page, and I can't even remember what I was going to say. Obama looks pretty busy there, I'd guess he is standing because he's tired of sitting on the desk. Oh, and being able to see the text of the article would help a lot right now. And while you are at it, my browser remembers my username and password for me, and it would be nice if your site would make use of that (Safari, if you want to know). And its time to throw Captcha back into the lake. But otherwise the site redesign is an improvement. Keep working out the bugs and it will only get better.
- JEFF FREY
September 1, 2009 at 11:01pm
Oh, yeah. I pretty much agree with Rhubarbs here. If Brooks wants the government to do nothing about everything, he should come out and say it, and give a convincing explanation for why that's better than doing something.
- JEFF FREY
September 1, 2009 at 11:03pm
The Virginia contrarian disputes the obvious. Of course power is being centralized in Washington. And his cited reason for denying it? The very point that Noam makes, that Barack Obama is wielding a relatively light hand. But doing it gingerly is still doing it.
- liberal reformer
September 2, 2009 at 5:09am
The Virginia contrarian disputes the obvious. Of course power is being centralized in Washington. And his cited reason for denying it? The very point that Noam makes, that Barack Obama is wielding a relatively light hand. But doing it gingerly is still doing it.
- liberal reformer
September 2, 2009 at 5:10am