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Obama Backpedals To Save His Presidency

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President Obama’s demotion of his Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, has drawn quite a bit of attention – despite efforts by the White House to downplay the significance of that event.  The demotion of Daley is significant because it indicates that Obama is now trying to back away from his original strategy of helping Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.  This move appears to be an attempt by Obama to re-cast himself as a populist, in response to the widespread success of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In September of 2010, I wrote a piece entitled, “Where Obama Went Wrong”.  Despite the subsequent spin by right-wing pundits, to the effect that voters had been enamored with the Tea Party’s emphasis on smaller government, the true reasons for the mid-term disaster for the Democrats had become obvious:

During the past week, we’ve been bombarded with explanations from across the political spectrum, concerning how President Obama has gone from wildly-popular cult hero to radioactive force on the 2010 campaign trail.  For many Democrats facing re-election bids in November, the presence of Obama at one of their campaign rallies could be reminiscent of the appearance of William Macy’s character from the movie, The Cooler.  Wikipedia’s discussion of the film provided this definition:

In gambling parlance, a “cooler” is an unlucky individual whose presence at the tables results in a streak of bad luck for the other players.

*   *   *

The American people are hurting because their President sold them out immediately after he was elected.  When faced with the choice of bailing out the zombie banks or putting those banks through temporary receivership (the “Swedish approach” – wherein the bank shareholders and bondholders would take financial “haircuts”) Obama chose to bail out the banks at taxpayer expense.  So here we are  . . .  in a Japanese-style “lost decade”.  In case you don’t remember the debate from early 2009 – peruse this February 10, 2009 posting from the Calculated Risk website.  After reading that, try not to cry after looking at this recent piece by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture entitled, “We Should Have Gone Swedish  . . .”

Back in December of 2009, Bill Daley – a minion of The Dimon Dog at JPMorgan Chase – wrote an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, which resonated with Wall Street’s tool in the White House.  Daley claimed that Obama and other Democrats were elected to office in 2008 because voters had embraced some pseudo-centrist ideas, which Daley referenced in these terms:

These independents and Republicans supported Democrats based on a message indicating that the party would be a true Big Tent — that we would welcome a diversity of views even on tough issues such as abortion, gun rights and the role of government in the economy.

*   *   *

All that is required for the Democratic Party to recover its political footing is to acknowledge that the agenda of the party’s most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, based on that recognition, to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, Obama was pre-disposed to accept this rationale, keeping his policy decisions on a trajectory which has proven as damaging to his own political future as it has been to the future of the American middle class.

On November 8, Jonathan Chait wrote a piece for New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog, wherein he explained that the demotion of Bill Daley revealed a “course correction” by Obama, in order to a pursue a strategy “in line with the realities of public opinion”.  Jonathan Chait explained how the ideas espoused by Daley in his 2009 Washington Post editorial, had been a blueprint for failure:

Daley, pursuing his theory, heavily courted business leaders.  He made long-term deficit reduction a top priority, and spent hours with Republican leaders, meeting them three-quarters of the way in hopes of securing a deal that would demonstrate his centrism and bipartisanship.  The effort failed completely.

The effort failed because Daley’s analysis – which is also the analysis of David Brooks and Michael Bloomberg – was fatally incorrect.  Americans were not itching for Obama to make peace with corporate America.  Americans are in an angry, populist mood – distrustful of government, but even more distrustful of business.  In the most recent NBC/The Wall Street Journal poll, 60 percent of Americans strongly agreed with the following statement:

The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country.  America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency.  The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich.

At the website of economist Brad DeLong, a number of comments were posted in response to Jonathan Chait’s essay.  One can only hope that our President has the same, clear understanding of this situation as do the individuals who posted these comments:

Full Employment Hawk said:

.   .   .   The defeat of the Democrats was due to the fact that the Obama administration did too little, not because it did too much.

Daley’s view that it was because the moderately progressive policies of the Obama administration were too far left for the center was totally wrong.  And listening to Daley’s advice to further shift from job creation to deficit reduction was a major blunder that reinforced the blunder of the first two years of dropping the ball on making the economy grow fast enough for the unemployment rate to be coming down significantly by the time of the Fall election.

In reply to the comment posted by Full Employment Hawk, a reader, identified as “urban legend” said this:

Obama should have been making the point over and over and over and over that getting more money into the hands of more Americans — principally right now by creating jobs — is the most pro-business stance you can take.  Continuing to let the 1% dictate everything in their favor is the most anti-business thing you can do.  We are the ones who want demand to rise for the goods and services of American business.  Right-wingers don’t care much about that.  What they do care about is maintaining their theology against all the evidence of its massive failure.

At Politico, Jonathan Chait’s essay provoked the following comment from Ben Smith:

It is entirely possible that no staff shift, and no ideological shift, can save Obama from a bad economy.  You don’t get to run controlled experiments in politics.

But it does seem worth noting that this argument pre-dates Daley: It’s the substance of the 2008 debate between Hillary Clinton and Obama, with Clinton portraying Obama as naive in his dream of bipartisan unity, and the Republicans as an implacable foe.  It’s the Clinton view, the ’90s view, that has prevailed here.

Indeed, it would be nice for all of us if Obama could get a “Mulligan” for his mishandling of the economic crisis.  Unfortunately, this ain’t golf.


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