Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the twelfth in his new series on the Obama era.
Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the twelfth in his new series on the Obama era.
It was clearly not where Obama thought he would be just two weeks to the day after his euphoric inauguration, repeating “I screwed up,” “I screwed up,” ad nauseam to television interviewers in the wake of Tom Daschle’s withdrawal, because of tax problems, as his all-important choice for the post of Health Secretary. And Daschle was the fourth of Obama’s cabinet nominees to either withdraw or be tarnished (his Treasury pick Tim Geithner survived, diminished) by revelations that he or she had ‘forgotten’ to pay certain taxes in the past.
Granted, Obama’s mea culpa was a welcome change from GW Bush’s refusal ever to admit a mistake; and granted, his personal popularity remained at a high 66 per cent, notwithstanding the sudden drubbing he was getting from a mainstream media which had fretted at the bit in the year-long haze of Obamania. (“Well, that was fast: Obama comes down to earth,” judged the NYT’s tone-setting columnist Maureen Dowd. “This is not what Obama promised,” scolded Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. “So much for hope over fear,” sneered the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer.)
The bigger problem was that — distracted perhaps by the Geithner embarrassment, and in particular by the loss of his key player and close friend, Daschle — Obama had let the stimulus package debate get away from him. For the moment, his fledgling presidency hung on getting his $900 billion stimulus proposal through Congress; yet, against all odds, the just-routed Senate Republicans (House Republicans having already voted en bloc to block it) looked to be successfully spinning Obama’s rescue plan as just another pork-laden mishmash of wasteful spending by the big-spending Democrats. Polls showed that public support for the package had fallen from 45 to 37 per cent.
Coming from the party that for seven years had happily rubber-stamped Bush administration fiscal and other policies that succeeded in doubling the US national debt to nearly $12 trillion, this gave new meaning to the term ‘chutzpah.’ And it also had to be risky: many of those Republican Senators represented states where people were crying out for the government to do something, anything, as the US economy went right on contracting alarmingly. Six hundred thousand Americans lost their jobs in January, the highest monthly figure in 34 years.
“Obama’s desire to begin a ‘post-partisan’ era may have backfired,” wrote Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh (‘How Obama lost control of the agenda’). “In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day… This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply. But the public isn’t hearing about that all-important distinction right now.”
Hirsh’s prescription: “Obama needs to remind the American people that unless the Republicans get on board, they will bear political responsibility for failing to act in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression… The decisive issue here is leadership. The lack of it is what is plaguing the Obama administration.”
The NYT’s Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, warning that the US economy was in danger of tipping over into “the deflationary trap,” was scathing:
“A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts. It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened — yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated. Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss.”
And The Washington Post’s EJ Dionne cautioned: “In just two weeks, Obama and his advisers have been forced to learn basic lessons on the run. The elation of Inauguration Day has given way to a classic form of partisan hardball. The media cannot be counted on to be either liberal or permanently enchanted with any politician. Arguments left unanswered can take hold, whether they make sense or not. And one more lesson: No occupant of the White House has ever been able to walk on water.”
There was evident relief when, in the latter part of the week, Obama finally abandoned his cakes-and-tea approach to Republican lawmakers and began reminding them who had caused the current collapse and who would be blamed if his administration were blocked in the Senate from doing anything about it.
“The American people did not choose more of the same,” Obama said. “They did not send us to Washington to get stuck in partisan posturing, or to turn back to the same tried and failed approaches that were rejected in the last election.
They sent us here with a mandate for change, and the expectation that we would act. These Americans are counting on us. All of us in Washington must remember that we’re here to work for the American people. And if we drag our feet and fail to act, this crisis will turn into a catastrophe.”
The NYT pronounced itself “happy to see President Obama getting tough with Congressional Republicans who are trying to sabotage the stimulus and recovery bill and bring even greater ruin on the economy.”
And Politico reported approvingly that “A fired-up Barack Obama ditched his TelePrompter to rally House Democrats and rip Republican opponents of his recovery package Thursday night — at one point openly mocking the GOP for failing to follow through on promises of bipartisanship.”
Clearly the time for poetry has passed.
