January 21. 2010
In the aftermath of Coakley Dokeley’s failed quest to replace Teddy Kennedy as Senator of Massachusetts, the airwaves and the blogosphere have been filled with an assortment of explanations for how and why the Bay State elected a Republican senator for the first time in 38 years. I saw the reason as a simple formula: One candidate made 66 campaign appearances while the other made 19. The rationale behind the candidate’s lack of effort was simple: she took the voters for granted. This was the wrong moment to be taking the voters for chumps. At a time when Democrats were vested with a “supermajority” in the Senate, an overwhelming majority in the House and with control over the Executive branch, they overtly sold out the interests of their constituents in favor of payoffs from lobbyists. Obama’s centerpiece legislative effort, the healthcare bill, turned out to be another “crap sandwich” of loopholes, exceptions, escape clauses and an effective date after the Mayan-prophesized end of the world. Obama’s giveaway to Big Pharma was outdone by Congressional giveaways to the healthcare lobby.
The Democrats’ efforts to bring about financial reform are now widely viewed as just another opportunity to rake in money and favors from lobbyists, leaving the suckers who voted for them to suffer worse than before. Coakley Dokeley made the same mistake that Obama and most politicians of all stripes are making right now: They’re taking the suckers for granted. That narrative seems to be another important reason why the Massachusetts senatorial election has become such a big deal. There is a lesson to be learned by the politicians, who are likely to ignore it.
Paul Farrell recently wrote an open letter to President Obama for MarketWatch, entitled: “10 reasons Obama is now failing 95 million investors”. In his discussion of reason number five, “Failing to pick a cast of characters that could have changed history”, Farrell made this point:
Last year many voted for you fearing McCain might pick Phil Gramm as Treasury secretary. Unfortunately, Mr. President, your picks not only revived Reaganomics under the guise of Keynesian economics, you sidelined a real change-agent, Paul Volcker, and picked Paulson-clones like Geithner and Summers. But worst of all, you’re reappointing Bernanke, a Greenspan clone, as Fed chairman, an economist who, as Taleb put it, “doesn’t even know he doesn’t understand how things work.” And with that pick, you proved you also don’t understand how things work.
Another former Obama supporter, Mort Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report and publisher of the New York Daily News, wrote a piece for The Daily Beast, examining Obama’s leadership shortcomings:
In the campaign, he said he would change politics as usual. He did change them. It’s now worse than it was. I’ve now seen the kind of buying off of politicians that I’ve never seen before. It’s politically corrupt and it’s starting at the top. It’s revolting.
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I hope there are changes. I think he’s already laid in huge problems for the country. The fiscal program was a disaster. You have to get the money as quickly as possible into the economy. They didn’t do that. By end of the first year, only one-third of the money was spent. Why is that?
He should have jammed a stimulus plan into Congress and said, “This is it. No changes. Don’t give me that bullshit. We have a national emergency.” Instead they turned it over to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who can run circles around him.
As for the Democrats’ pre-sabotaged excuse for “financial reform”, the fate of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency is now in the hands of “Countrywide Chris” Dodd, who is being forced into retirement because the people of Connecticut are fed up with him. As a result, this is his last chance to get some more “perks” from his position as Senate Banking Committee chairman. Elizabeth Warren, the person likely to be appointed to head the CFPA, explained to Reuters that banking lobbyists might succeed in “gutting” the proposed agency:
“The CFPA is the best indicator of whether Congress will reform Wall Street or whether it will continue to give Wall Street whatever it wants,” she told Reuters in an interview.
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Consumer protection is relatively simple and could easily be fixed, she said. The statutes, for the most part, already exist, but enforcement is in the hands of the wrong people, such as the Federal Reserve, which does not consider it central to its main task of maintaining economic stability, she said.
Setting up the CFPA is largely a matter of stripping the Fed and other agencies of their consumer protection duties and relocating them into a new agency.
With all the coverage and expressed anticipation that the Massachusetts election will serve as a “wake-up call” to Obama and Congressional Democrats, not all of us are so convinced. Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns put it this way:
But, I don’t think the President gets it. He is holed up in the echo chamber called the White House. If the catastrophic loss in Massachusetts’ Senate race and the likely defeat of his health care reform bill doesn’t wake Obama up to the realities that he is not in Roosevelt’s position but in Hoover’s, he will end as a failed one-term President.
I agree. I also believe that the hubris will continue. Why would any of these politicians change their behavior? The “little people” never did matter. They exist solely to be played as fools. They are powerless against the plutocracy. Right?
An Early Favorite For 2010
February 11, 2010
It appears as though the runner-up for TheCenterLane.com’s 2009 Jackass of the Year Award is well on his way to winning the title for 2010. After reading an op-ed piece by Ross Douthat of The New York Times, I decided that as of December 31, 2009, it was too early to determine whether our new President was worthy of such a title.
Since Wednesday morning, we have been bombarded with reactions to a story from Bloomberg News, concerning an interview Obama had with Bloomberg BusinessWeek in the Oval Office. In case you haven’t seen it, here is the controversial passage from the beginning of that article:
Many commentators have expounded upon what this tells us about our President. I’d like to quote the reactions from a couple of my favorite bloggers. Here’s what Yves Smith had to say at Naked Capitalism:
At his Credit Writedowns website, Edward Harrison made this observation:
Victoria McGrane of Politico gave us a little background on Obama’s longstanding relationship with The Dimon Dog:
Some commentators have expressed the view that Obama is making a transparent attempt to curry favor with the banking lobby in time to get those contributions flowing to Democratic candidates in the mid-term elections. Nevertheless, for Obama, this latest example of trying to please both sides of a debate will prove to be yet another “lose/lose” situation. As Victoria McGrane pointed out:
As for those members of the electorate who usually vote Democratic, you can rest assured that a large percentage will see this as yet another act of betrayal. They saw it happen with the healthcare reform debacle and they’re watching it happen again in the Senate, as the badly-compromised financial reform bill passed by the House (HR 4173) is being completely defanged. A bad showing by the Democrats on November 2, 2010 will surely be blamed on Obama.
As of February 11, we already have a “favorite” in contention for the 2010 Jackass of the Year Award. It’s time for the competition to step forward!