A Bush, Not A Clinton

It's fashionable to say that President Obama has borrowed Bill Clinton's post-1994 playbook. Jon Meacham says Obama's playing a much riskier, gutsier game:

It was in 1990 that Mr. Bush broke one of the most celebrated promises in modern American politics —“Read my lips: no new taxes,” as he put it in 1988 — in order to control federal spending. In the same way that Mr. Obama struck his deal to secure lower tax rates for the middle-class and win an extension of unemployment benefits, Mr. Bush gave on tax rates to get “pay as you go” rules — meaning that no further spending could be approved without compensating budget cuts or revenue increases. It was the beginning of the fiscal discipline that helped create the budget surpluses of the 1990s.

While Mr. Obama’s immediate concern is stimulus and Mr. Bush’s was deficit-reduction, both gave way on issues critical to the true believers within their parties. For Mr. Bush, it was political death. He had never been fully trusted by a Reaganite Republican base. Like Mr. Obama — who is unhappy with his “sanctimonious” left wing — Mr. Bush was no ideologue.

Obama Rising

President Obama's historic compromise on taxes and unemployment benefits feels like the beginning of his second, six-year term.

His biggest political problem was the impression that he cared more about his health insurance and financial reform agenda than job creation and GDP growth. Republicans made it worse by refusing his pleas to extend unemployment benefits, which they said they'd never do unless he came up with compensatory budget cuts so that the relatively paltry amount needed to help the jobless wouldn't contribute to the deficit.

Today, in one deft move, Obama scored a win for those the economy is hurting most and showed that the GOP could be had. Not only did congressional Republicans not get their budget cuts, they got a two-year extension of tax cuts that will contribute even more to the deficit, at least in the short term. What their concession proves is that they never really cared about the deficit. They just cared about hurting Obama, and they'd have liked nothing better than to keep hurting him. But Obama realized that they care even more about their Reaganite supply-side ideology, whose cornerstone is relieving the tax burden of one of their key constituencies -- and, in fairness, those who are in the best position of any group of private individuals to invest in growth.

The deal on the tax cuts has predictably ignited the ire of the Democrat left, which is so obsessed with its own, soak-the-rich ideology that it too lapses into inauthentic posturing about the deficit. You can't argue for two years, as most liberal and progressive economists have, that the recovery of the economy depends on massive deficit spending by the government only to turn around and oppose tax cuts strictly on the grounds of fiscal prudence.

Some think the Reagan tax cuts in 1981-82 didn't do as much to ignite the decade's economic miracle as his champions do. Whether supply-side skeptics are right or wrong, today's news suggests that Obama gives considerable credence to what the Congressional Budget Office argued back in August: That putting a little more money into tycoons' pockets, on top of the modest gains the economy is enjoying already, sure can't hurt.

So look what the president's accomplished today. He's finally emerged as champion of the long-term unemployed. He's exposed deficit chicken hawks on both sides of the aisle. He's shown that he's willing to compromise with Republicans, which is what independents and indeed the vast majority of Americans want him to do. And he's taken actions that can't help but strengthen the economy and, as a result, his prospects for reelection.

All that, and Sarah Palin as GOP frontrunner. That's what I call a good day.

Hey Rahm, About Those Tax Cuts...

In a Washington Post comparison of the Carter-Reagan and Bush-Obama recessions, we learn why some experts think Obama's 2012 economy might not look as rosy as Reagan's in 1984:

[R]ecessions caused by financial crises linger longer because of the shattered confidence of both consumers and businesses. [The Congressional Budget Office] went on to state, "In addition, under current law, both the waning of fiscal stimulus and the scheduled increases in taxes will temporarily subtract from growth, especially in 2011."

Status Quo We Can Believe In

Everyone is making us fearful this week. Dick Cheney says that the relaxation of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies, especially the release of certain Guantanamo suspects, make us more vulnerable. On Fox News tonight, Glenn Beck said that since we're on the verge of nationalizing the banks and the stimulus bill looks socialist, that adds up to national socialism, which means we may be about to become another Nazi Germany. This was scary because it was so impossibly, offensively stupid.

President Obama has also been selling fear. Obviously he wants to get his bill passed. But when Senate Republicans said they wanted more tax cuts, he condemned their pleas with boilerplate "failed policies of the past" rhetoric:

Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed. They've taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, and they've brought our economy to a halt. And that's precisely what the election we just had was all about.

First, this low-grade partisan tongue-lashing ignores the undeniable success of the income tax cuts proffered in their times by Kennedy, Reagan, and George W. Bush. Besides, the Bush deficits didn't paralyze the economy. The mortgage crisis and Lehman Bros. meltdown did. If deficits are really the problem, then after this bill, we'll definitely be toast.

Second, the bill positively bulges with residue of the failed policies of the past. Democrats are taking advantage of the economic crisis by loading it up with massive spending for pet projects, only 5% of which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will go for rebuilding infrastructure. Go here to see how appalled liberals and progressives are the relatively minor concessions won this week by Republicans -- most of which, many hope, will be undone in conference committee next week.

Third, where's the hope? How about some encouraging, uplifting rhetoric from the leader of the free world about the creative energy and spirit of the American people? This is where comparisons between Obama and Ronald Reagan fall especially flat. After all, it's we who will dig us out of the rubble, not Congress or Barack Obama. Our jobs are being lost at a near-record rate because consumers are saving instead of spending, not just those losing their jobs or homes, but everyone. Instead of defending his decision to spend taxpayers' money on 25,000 hybrids for federal employees to drive, Obama should be persuading people to buy pickup trucks (or Priuses, if he prefers) with their own money. Instead, with his talk of impending catastrophe, Obama can't help but weaken people's confidence even more. That's not leadership. It's opportunism.

Polls show that people don't much like the bill. He'll get it anyway. The economy will recover, as it always does. Recessions last an average of 18 months. Should the current one follow suit, Obama and his supporters will say it was the result of the bill. That's the way politics works. As Obama's big-spending friends keep saying, they won, and the Republicans lost. In a way, it's reassuring. After months of unhealthful idealization, Obama has settled down to earth, and we have the status quo we can believe in.