Gene Sperling
Bob Woodward: Thin Skin, Thinner Argument
What the newspaper scribe doesn't understand about the sequester
Gene Sperling once intimidated me. READ MORE >>
The Washington Post's Overly-Credulous Take on Boehner
On Sunday, The Washington Post published a long, blow-by-blow of last summer’s negotiations between Barack Obama and John Boehner over a $4 trillion deficit deal. The take-away from the piece is that Obama had a chance at a deal involving $800 billion in tax increases and trillions in spending cuts (including cuts to sacred programs like Medicare and Social Security), but that he got cold feet and backed away. READ MORE >>
Obama’s Worst Year
Why Cordray Matters, as Politics and Policy
Constitutional limits on power aren't trivial. They are important. READ MORE >>
Obama's New Message Takes Shape
A week ago, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration was divided over its strategy between advisers who wanted to emphasize accomplishments and those who wanted to emphasize pragmatic accomplishments and those who wanted to confront Congressional Republicans: READ MORE >>
Obama Economic Team: Get Out of Town
[Guest post by Kara Brandeisky] In The New York Times, Binyamin Appelbaum and Helene Cooper report that the Obama camp is split on how to move forward on economic issues: READ MORE >>
The Crazy Baseline Fight
There's a really strange fight brewing between the Obama administration and Republicans over which baseline the supercommittee should use to measure its deficit proposals. The baseline is the comparison the Congressional Budget Office uses to figure out how much a policy change saves. Republicans say the baseline needs to be "current law." READ MORE >>
Gaming Out the Debt Deal: Will It Hurt Obamacare?
The emerging, if still tentative, conventional wisdom about the debt ceiling agreement is that Democrats may ultimately prefer the plan’s automatic spending cuts to whatever cuts the new super-committee proposes. READ MORE >>
A Pivot to Jobs? Or Not?
Are President Obama and his advisers alarmed about the tepid recovery? Are they working feverishly to think up new interventions, the kind that involve increasing short-term deficits, to strengthen it? I would like to think the answer to both questions is "yes." But public signals from the president and his advisers remain ambiguous, while even some of the administration's more well-connected friends are getting nervous about how White House rhetoric is shaping the debate. READ MORE >>
