I'm the President, and I'm Mad as Hell

Barack Obama was elected president for two reasons. The first is that he did not rise in anger to the baiting of his opponents. Nor the baiting of his friends either, but that is a more complicated matter. The prospect of campaigning against an “angry young black man” was so attractive to various Republicans that they tried very hard to get him to say something angrily on television.

The second is that he promised bipartisanship. “There are not red states and blue states,” candidate Obama proclaimed several hundred times, “There is the United States of America.” Partisan gridlock in Congress was already a grievance to independent voters and campaigning against it was a really smart move.

That was then. This is now.

The New York Times editorialized this morning that President Obama is finally starting to do it right. He is on a bus tour in the Midwest and at every stop, he is showing his anger at the failure of the Congress to act responsibly and is blaming the Republicans for the current impasse. Maybe the Times thinks that Obama can afford to be the “angry young black man” now that he’s president. Maybe the Times is so angry and partisan that it can’t appreciate a president who is not as angry and partisan as they are. Maybe the Times thinks that the country is now hungry for an angry and partisan president.

I don’t know, but I’m partial to explanation number 2, myself.

CBS/New York Times Poll, August 2011

There has been so much hand-wringing about the debt-limit debate. All of it justified, in my opinion. A few posts ago, I compared it to a “game” of Russian roulette rather than the more common metaphor of a “game” of chicken.

Then I read the New York Times/CBS Poll for August 2 and 3 and it occurred to me that it is always possible that democracy might solve our problem this time. Maybe not. I’m not predicting anything. But I do want to pause briefly to talk about the much-maligned “responsible party model” (RPM).

Here’s the way I talk about it in PS 102. In Step 1, policy-oriented parties recruit candidates who will support those policies and fund their campaigns. If you want a policy-oriented national party, you can’t have yellow dog Democrats running in liberal districts and blue dog Democrats running in conservative districts—and then voting against each other in Congress. In Step 2, the parties run policy-oriented campaigns (rather than personality-oriented ones). The party that wins the majority now has an elected majority capable of fulfilling the party’s promises—more like the situation we expect in parliamentary systems. So in Step 3, the party in power enacts and approves the policies it campaigned on. Then, in Step 4, the crucial step, they return to their constituents with a record to talk about. Maybe even the beginnings of actual achievements based on their legislative stewardship. At that stage, the party says, “We did what we said. How do you like it? If you send us back, we’ll do more of it, so consider your policy desires carefully.”

It isn’t very realistic in modern American politics, but you can see why I like it, right? I like that last stage particularly because it is the only circumstance under which people can evaluate actual policy-generated outcomes and say whether they like them. Evaluating promises and intentions is uncertain work; evaluating outcomes is more the kind of thing it is fair to expect voters to do.

So what about the Times/CBS poll? Here are some results that caught my eye. Obama’s approval rating is at 48%. It hasn’t been above 60% since June 2009 and it hasn’t been about 50% since April 2010 except for a one poll spike in May of this year. That was bin Laden’s execution, I suppose.

People are not happy about the way “things are going in Washington.” Combining the two least approving columns gets you 84%. Combining the two most approving columns gets you 15%.

Since June of last year, the percentage of people who disapprove the way Congress is “handling its job” has been above 70%, but it has moved from 70% in June to 82% in August. Here are some relevant additional figures. Approve of John Boehner? Yes, 30%, No, 57%. The way Republicans in Congress have handled the recent negotiations? Approve 21%, Disapprove 72% Approve Democrats in Congress (same question)? Approve 28%, Disapprove 66%. Do “most members” of Congress deserve to be re-elected? No, 74%

I see anger, frustration, and pain there. The natives are restless.

Who do you trust more to make the right decisions about the nation’s economy? Republicans in Congress, 33%; Barack Obama 47%. Is it better for the parties to compromise or stick to their positions? Compromise, 85%; hold fast, 12%. Who is mostly to blame? Here I’ll give you the current figure and the trend since the last poll. The Bush administration is to blame, 44%, up 3% since April; The Obama administration is to blame, 15% up 1% since April; the Congress is to blame, 15%, up 3% since April.

Who do you blame more of “the difficulties in reaching an agreement” on the debt ceiling? Republicans in Congress, 47%, Barack Obama and the Democrats 29%. Did the Republicans in Congress compromise too little? Yes, 52% (15% said “too much” and 32% said “the right amount.”) Did Barack Obama and the Democrats compromise too much? Yes, 26% (34% said too little and 32% the right amount.) Those percentages are roughly thirds; that’s very good for the Democrats. Are you optimistic about the ability of this Congress to deal with future issues? Yes, 12%, No 66%. Should taxes be increased above the $250,000 level to help balance the budget? Yes, 63%, No 34%.

So that’s how Americans were feeling earlier in the week. What if the RPM kicks in for the general elections in the fall of 2012? People who said they absolutely would not raise taxes run into an electorate two thirds of them disagrees with them and now these “candidates” are incumbents and they are presenting what they have done, not what they promised to do. That doesn’t seem a good prospect for Republicans in Congress who campaigned on holding firm and not compromising and who signed a no tax pledge.

If I were Barack Obama, I would make the campaign about whether you want actual adults in charge of the economy or adolescent zealots. I would NOT make the campaign about whether I had done a good job of managing the economy over my first term, but in trying to avoid that, I would be helped by the 44% who still blame the Bush administration for what is wrong with the economy.

If the voters react in 2012 by rewarding people who promise to compromise and to include more revenue in out “living within our means” issue, then democracy will have done what it is supposed to do. It will have registered the judgments of actual voters on actual outcomes. If the voters felt otherwise—if they felt, for instance, that the economy wasn’t all that bad in 2009 and that Obama should have fixed it by now—then democracy would work exactly the same way and the Democrats would be slaughtered by the new round of votes.

But I don’t think they will be.

Dr. Obama's Bedside Manner Needs Work

It occurred to me recently, that back in the bad old days of medicine when there was very little you could actually do for a patient, people understood their job to be “being with” the patient and making him or her comfortable. The illness was going to what it was going to do. Before germ theory came along, everything was even more mysterious than it is now. The bedside manner emphasized “I’m here for you” rather than “Take two of these and call me in the morning.”

When “take two of these” works, I’m pretty happy with it and I am delighted in the great progress medicine has made since it discovered germs. But I didn’t have these little medical reflections for no reason at all. There was something going on that had those same contours and it took me a little while to catch just what it was.

It’s the economy. It’s in bad shape and it’s going to go on being in bad shape for quite a while. Dr. Obama would really like to be a “take two of these and call me in the morning” kind of president. It’s his style. But Dr. Obama doesn’t have access to anything, two of which will help his patient. The president will, of course, do a lot of Republican bashing over the next year—as he should—but he is still going to be held accountable for the bad economy and he doesn’t have any way to treat it.

Let’s consider some possibilities. Let’s give the banks a bunch of money so they can loan it to people who will do something productive with it. Dr. Obama can see to it that the banks get a bunch of money. He cannot require them to actually lend it to anyone. When the banks get the money, they will consult their own needs for reserves, for security, for high return loans and when they have considered all those, they will just sit on the money.

Let’s encourage companies to hire more workers. This would help with the unemployment problem, one would think. As the economy picks up, the companies really could use more workers, but they make more money by reducing workforces than they do by increasing them. The new economic situation, in other words, allows quite a few currently unemployed workers to get their jobs back, but it doesn’t require the companies to rehire them. The new “leaner” companies are going to be much more profitable, even as the economy continues to crawl along in low gear. Nothing the President can say will cause these companies to make less profit so that the economy will improve.

The President could always raise taxes on businesses, of course, and use the new revenues to invest in new technologies and more employment. But there’s this problem with the businesses. They get the same services from the U. S. government whether they pay taxes or not and a business that has an accounting department that does NOT know how to keep the profits safe in an off-shore bank has a very uncreative accounting department.

The President could always cut taxes on the rich, of course, allowing them to create new jobs as their market savvy allows them to. That has been prescribed many times and actually tried several times and it turns out that the rich have better things to do with their money than use it to increase production and therefore employment. Yachts and corporate jets come readily to mind, but I am sure there are lots of less visible things to spend the money one. The point is that they don’t spend it in ways that help the economy in any broad way.

Robert Reich argues persuasively in his book, Aftershock, that the fundamental problem of the American economy is that we don’t pay our workers enough to enable them to buy what we make. Consumer spending is two thirds of the Gross Domestic Product, I heard yesterday on the radio. Increasing what we pay the workers would enable them to spend more money—and they would spend it—which would increase demand, which would increase employment, etc. This is the well-known Henry Ford solution. It was Ford who scandalized the whole world of business by paying his assembly line workers enough money that they could buy Ford cars. He sold a lot of Ford cars that way, but Reich passes along some of the commentary that appeared in the Wall Street Journal when he did that. Scathing!

So that is a “treatment” that would work. There is nothing Dr. Obama can do, unfortunately, to get that prescription filled. Nothing. Actually, there isn’t anything in the whole “take two of these and call me in the morning” world that the President can do. And that’s why I think it is time for him to break out his bedside manner and get into the “I’m here for you” mode. This guy’s got the idea, I think.

Debt-Limit Chicken--And Worse

July 27, 2011. It is now less than a week until the United States of America tells the people who have loaned money to us that we were, after all, a bad risk. The debt limit confrontation has been pictured as a game of chicken between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner, the only presiding official in the Congress who opposes him. Sen. McConnell will have to wait his turn.

So…a game of chicken. We drive our cars toward each other at high speeds. In the best outcome, you flinch and turn aside and I win. In the second best outcome, I flinch and you win. In the least good outcome, neither of us turns and we kill each other. But now that I have gone that I realize that there is an outcome even worse. We both flinch and turn into each other (that would be to the right for you and to the left for me—how very familiar that sounds!) and reveals ourselves not only as cowards but as incompetent cowards. That would be worse.
I’m not sure that chicken captures all the elements of this contest, however, so I would like to try several others. How about Russian Roulette? You spin the cylinder, put the gun to your head, and pull the trigger. You have five chances out of six of surviving—if you do it one time. If you do it over and over—I’m not at all good at calculating cumulative probabilities—the odds get worse.

So let’s consider the roulette elements of the present situation. President Obama can’t control the Democratic votes he needs to pass the compromise he prefers. Speaker Boehner can’t control the Republican votes he needs to pass the compromise he prefers, which, until recently, was the same one the President preferred. The two parties are highly ideological. Votes which pitted 80% of Democrats voting one way against 80% of Republicans voting the other way were once unusual; now they are the commonest kind of vote. The new Tea Party-backed Republican House members believe they owe intransigence to their constituents—it is their sworn duty—and that intransigence has now been turned against the leader of their own party. This has led Eric Cantor, the Number 2 man in the House to tell them to “Grow up,” a sentiment also found on the lips of the President. How awkward is that?

This is highly unstable. Now we approach this brink over and over. The probability of hitting the live chamber, by this analogy, goes up radically as you do it over and over. Eventually, you will hit the live chamber—that would be the House in the present scenario—and you blow your brains out. Actually, that might have happened in the 2010 elections; it’s still too soon to tell.

The third scenario, one which captures yet another aspect of this impending disaster, is a champion battle. I’m thinking of David and Goliath as an example. I’m not really sure, now that I think of it, what was supposed to happen to the army of the defeated contestant. Were they supposed to be massacred? To be slaves? To be put in internment camps? I really don’t know. But it doesn’t really matter, because the notion of “champion” is all I need. Theoretically, if David wins, it is good news for the Israelites. If Goliath wins, it is good news for the Philistines. But fiscal default isn’t really like that. If we default, both David and Goliath lose. And all the people David and Goliath represent also lose. All of us are killed or enslaved or put in camps, or whatever. The cost to anyone of borrowing money for anything will go up, for instance. You don’t need to be on the losing side to suffer this defeat because both sides are the losing sides—not just the champions but the armies and not just the armies but the civilian populations. Everyone—litigators, bundlers of financial instruments and off-shore hiders of revenue and Chainsaw Al personnel departments—loses.

These three images together give us a fuller picture, I think, of what
we’re up against. This account sounds crude and contemporary to my ears,
however. This is how Lincoln put it.

“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were
anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to
avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place,
devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and
divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them
would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would
accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”