Quotables

From “Sticking It to Rahm,” by John Batchelor, the great radio host (Larry Johnson is a regular guest on Batchelor’s show every Sunday night at 7:35 p.m. PT, KVI 640 AM), for The Daily Beast. Talk about “blowback”!

Emanuel, working with his old boss and ally, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, made it easy for the Republicans to resist. Every penny in the more than 600-page bill came from a Democratic wish list of pork that dated back to the beginning of the Bush administration. [...]

“We won the election, we wrote the bill,” said Pelosi as many times as she could to an open microphone. … [All it took for Republicans to hold it together] was bring up Rahm Emanuel.

“Rahm hates us and lets us know it, and we hate him back,” said a senior Republican. “If we had gotten together in a room and tried to write a bill that put the taxpayer together with the Republican Party, we could not have come up with this thing. …”

Rahm Emanuel is the Republicans’ favorite piñata. Overwound and overbearing, the Chicago congressman helped destroy the Republican majority in 2006 when he acted as chief fund raiser, candidate recruiter, and stump speaker. On the night the Democrats took the House back after 12 years of Republican rule, he praised himself for delivering a “thumpin’.” Now that he’s Obama’s chief of staff, the Republicans have him to poke at for at least four years. …

From “Cleaner and Faster,” by David Brooks for his New York Times column on January 27, 2009, a reminder of the stimulus package that Obama adviser Larry Summers envisioned and how the Democrats have failed to listen to their wise adviser, abandoning cautious, direct stimulation for an undisciplined hodgepodge plan.

The only problem with Brooks’ analysis is that he lays the blame for the hodgepodge mess at the feet of Congress but — ahem — let’s instead ask just who is it who brought Larry Summers in, who is supposed to be heeding Summers’ direct guidance, and who should be in charge of how the stimulus package is built? Perhaps the leader? And who would be? Yes. He. “The One.” As I’m writing this, I’m hearing President Obama on a teevee news show complaining loudly about those greedy Wall Street execs who are taking big bonuses, but PBO is pulling a magician’s trick. He’s distracting the onlookers from what’s really going on, which is that the BOSS is not in charge! If PBO has any prayer of rescuing this economy, he has got to stand up to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and let them know who’s in charge.

Brooks describes Summers’ original concept for the stimulus package:

Throughout 2008, Larry Summers, the Harvard economist, built the case for a big but surgical stimulus package. Summers warned that a “poorly provided fiscal stimulus can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured.” So his proposal had three clear guidelines.

First, the stimulus should be timely. The money should go out “almost immediately.” Second, it should be targeted. It should help low- and middle-income people. Third, it should be temporary. Stimulus measures should not raise the deficits “beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two.”

Summers was proposing bold action, but his concept came with safeguards: focus on the task at hand, prevent the usual Washington splurge and limit long-term fiscal damage.

But now, Brooks continues, we have this instead:

In a fateful decision, Democratic leaders merged the temporary stimulus measure with their permanent domestic agenda — including big increases for Pell Grants, alternative energy subsidies and health and entitlement spending. The resulting package is part temporary and part permanent, part timely and part untimely, part targeted and part untargeted.

It’s easy to see why Democrats decided to do this. They could rush through permanent policies they believe in. Plus, they could pay for them with borrowed money. By putting a little of everything in the stimulus package, they avoid the pay-as-you-go rules that might otherwise apply to recurring costs.

But they’ve created a sprawling, undisciplined smorgasbord, which has spun off a series of unintended consequences. First, by trying to do everything all it once, the bill does nothing well. The money spent on long-term domestic programs means there may not be enough to jolt the economy now (about $290 billion in spending is pushed off into 2011 and later). The money spent on stimulus, meanwhile, means there’s not enough to truly reform domestic programs like health technology, schools and infrastructure. The measure mostly pumps more money into old arrangements.

Second, by pumping so much money through government programs, the bill unleashes a tidal wave on state governments. A governor with a few-hundred-billion-dollar shortfall will suddenly have to administer an additional $4 billion or $5 billion. That money will be corrosive both when washing in, and when it disappears in a few years time.

Third, the muddle assures ideological confrontation. A stimulus package was always going to be controversial, because economists differ widely about whether or how a stimulus can work. But this bill also permanently alters the role of the federal government, thus guaranteeing a polarizing brawl at the very start of the Obama presidency.

Fourth, Summers’s warnings about deficits have been put aside. There is no fiscal exit strategy. Instead, permanent spending commitments are entailed with no permanent funding stream to pay for them.

Fifth, new government expenditures on complex matters are being designed on a hasty, reckless timetable. As readers may know, the policy I am most passionate about is pre-K education. Yet I fervently hope that the Head Start expansion is dropped from this bill. A slapdash and shambolic expansion could discredit the whole idea. …

Makes sense to me.

Brooks recommends that the Democrats listen to Alice Rivlin, “Bill Clinton’s former budget director, [who] raised the possibility of separating the temporary from the permanent measures and focusing independently on each.”

“A long-term investment program should not be put together hastily and lumped in with the anti-recession package,” Rivlin testified. “The elements of the investment program must be carefully planned and will not create many jobs right away.”

The best course is to return to the original Summers parameters — temporary, targeted and timely — thus making the stimulus cleaner and faster. …

What are the odds the Senate will do this? To get back to my premise, what are the odds that President Obama will get Summers back into the Oval, organize the bill, and shove the disciplined plan down the windpipes of Harry Reid, et al. This is ultimately ALL ON OBAMA. He has to come through. This is why people voted for him. He needs to regain control of the undisciplined Congressional Dems and their endless pet projects. Or all is lost.

NEXT UP: One of the blogs I find most amusing for its Obama-groveling is the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal. Here we see the Animal baying at Mark Halperin for having the audacity to criticize The One:

The entire Republican caucus, we now know, balked anyway. Time‘s Mark Halperin, naturally, is blaming Obama. From this morning’s appearance on MSNBC:

“This is a really bad sign for Barack Obama to try to change Washington…. He needs bipartisan solutions. They went for it and they came up with zero…. [This] does not bode well for a future that is supposed to be post-partisan. [...]

“[Obama] could have gone for centrist compromises. You can say to your own party, ‘Sorry, some of you liberals aren’t going to like it, but I am going to change this legislation radically to get a big centrist majority rather than an all-Democratic vote.’ He chose not to do that, that’s the exact path that George Bush took for most of his presidency with disastrous consequences for bipartisanship and solving big problems.”

It’s hard to overstate how foolish this analysis is.

Halperin believes, for reasons that are unclear, that the paramount goal was to win the support of lawmakers who were wrong and who were advocating bad ideas. It’s not about what works, or what would actually improve the economy in the midst of a serious recession. What really matters is “bipartisan solutions.” Why? Because Mark Halperin says so. Merit be damned — if Democrats liked the legislation and Republicans didn’t, it’s necessarily flawed.

In our reality, Obama did make “centrist compromises,” and liberals in the Democratic Party didn’t like it. Obama did the opposite of Bush’s style of governing — he engaged the congressional minority, listened to their ideas, and weakened his own bill to garner a larger majority. House Republicans insisted on a worse bill, Democrats wouldn’t give them one, so the GOP voted against it. Halperin inexplicably believes that’s Obama’s fault.

I’m trying to wrap my head around Halperin’s logic here. By his reasoning, the only appropriate thing for Obama to do was let Republicans — who failed at governing, and who’ve been rejected by voters — shape the bill, addressing the crisis they helped create. If the far-right House GOP caucus was unsatisfied, it was Obama’s responsibility to make them happy. Why? Because Mark Halperin says so.

This is absurd.

Absurd? Yes it is. But it’s you and yours who are absurd. All I have to say to you, Animal, is, “See above.” I.e., instead of whining about criticism of your Savior, please read the original Summers package concept and use your limited influence to get Obama to take charge, alongside Summers — and Geithner — and tell those lawmakers to act like GROWN-UPS!

Okay, kids, it’s late and I’m quitting for now. But this was a fun exercise, and I even learned a thing or two.

Coming up later this morning are Larry Doyle, Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy and more of our great writers!