March 10, 2009

3/10: Piling On The President

It seems like nobody in the political blogosphere is happy with Pres. Obama's efforts to deal with the financial crisis thus far. On the left side of the blogosphere, many are complaining that Obama isn't being forthright about the money he's giving to insolvent banks, while others are frustrated by what they perceive to be the overall lack of a plan. On the right side of the blogosphere, bloggers are buzzing about the "ineffectiveness" of Obama's efforts to improve the economy and wondering whether Obama "has crashed the markets on purpose" or if he's simply "incompetent."

What else is happening in the blogosphere?

• Liberal bloggers (Marshall, Moulitsas, Benen, Aravosis) are buzzing about Rep. Patrick McHenry's (R-NC) admission that the GOP's goal "is to bring down [the] approval numbers" of congressional Dems.
• Conservative bloggers (Kudlow, Impomeni, Ponnuru, Hengler) are criticizing Obama's decision to reverse George W. Bush's restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research.

BANKS: Where's Our Money Going, Mr. President?

Several liberal bloggers are complaining that the Obama admin. isn't being forthright about the money it's giving to insolvent banks:

• Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher: "In an interview published in yesterday's New York Times, President Obama says that it could take another $750 billion to bail out the banks beyond the $700 billion already approved. Yet serious questions surround the money already distributed to Wall Street, and attempts to determine how it was disbursed have been stonewalled. [...] Before Congress approves any more funds, the public needs to know where all our money has gone. The government needs to tell us what happened to the AIG money and open the books on its other lending facilities. They need to move swiftly to re-regulate a system whose rules have been written by bank lobbyists for their own benefit, and until they do, there will be no public confidence in our financial system. Restoring that trust is critical in getting our economy back on its feet, and additional funds should be forthcoming until that happens."
• Arianna Huffington: "While we're rewarding the risk-taking shareholders of various zombie banks -- not to mention the mysterious, unconfirmed counterparties to AIG's serial recklessness -- how about rewarding the taxpayers, if not with an actual return on our bailout investment then at least with information about what exactly is being done with our money? [...] Instead, we're greeted with a wall of manufactured complexity by the people whose job it is to make known unknowns into known knowns. There is nothing complex about the way CEOs like John Thain, Ed Liddy, Lloyd Blankfein, John Mack, Vikram Pandit, and Ken Lewis turned bailout billions into Wall Street bonus money -- and no justification for keeping taxpayers in the dark about the giveaways."

AMERICAblog's Chris in Paris is frustrated by what he perceives as the Obama admin.'s overall lack of a plan: "What's the plan for the US banking industry? Nationalizing and cleaning them up? Letting them collapse? Breaking them up to prevent too big to fail? [Treasury Sec. Tim] Geithner is going to have to wake up sometime soon or Obama is going to need to make a change because the banking situation -- which Geithner was supposed to be watching in recent years -- looks no better today than it did last year, maybe worse. Having a plan is not such a bad idea, but that doesn't look like anything exists right now."

Meanwhile, other liberal bloggers are discussing the various difficulties associated with nationalizing insolvent banks.

OBAMA: He's A Failure Already?

Although Obama still possesses fairly high approval ratings, conservative bloggers are portraying his first fifty days as an abject failure (primarily because of his inability to reverse the economy's downward spiral):

• Townhall's Hugh Hewitt: "The Floundering, Fumbled First Fifty Days: Lots of rookies bat below the Mendoza line in their first two months in the big leagues, so past performance by the new president is no guarantee that he won't get his swing fixed. But lots of the inside-the-Beltway folk are worried."
• RedState's Jeff Emanuel: "An Utter Lack of Testing: Will President Obama Become an Object Lesson in What's Wrong With Our Presidential Selection Process? [...] President Obama is already showing the strain and exhaustion that come from being burdened with the highest office in the land -- and it's only been seven weeks. With him, we could very well be heading for an object lesson in the utter lack of testing and preparation we require our candidates for the Presidency to undergo."
• Right Wing News' John Hawkins: "During the 2008 presidential campaign, people speculated whether someone like Barack Obama, who has never really run anything or had any major achievements other than winning political office, could handle a three AM crisis call. Well, as it turns out, Obama has been such a bumbling incompetent that he probably couldn't handle a trip through a Wendy's drive-in window without a teleprompter telling him what to order and whether he wants a Coke or a Mountain Dew. Even though Obama has been in office less than two months, he has already made more boneheaded errors than most Presidents do in an entire term."
• Townhall's Carol Platt Liebau: "[G]iven the ineffectiveness so far of his efforts to turn the economy around -- indeed, the role his administration has played in driving the market down -- the American people are entitled to tell the President to slow down: Let's see how he performs in healing the economy, before we start authorizing his plans for sweeping change across the board."
• Hot Air's Ed Morrissey: "Just as [Kevin] Hassett makes the claim that Obama has crashed the markets on purpose, one can make the case that he's incompetent -- completely out of his league and clinging to his ideology rather than financial acumen."
• NRO's Victor Davis Hanson: "Obama's awkward corrective call to the NY Times that 'Bush is the socialist, not me!' comes after claiming that the Brit protocol disaster was due to his weariness and the frenzy of the job. That claim comes after the White House orchestrated attack on Rush [Limbaugh]. Yet the problem for Obamians is not in the stars, but in themselves, mostly a result of that classically unfortunate combination of hubris and inexperience. The Obamians need to get a life and govern the country, rather than blaming their gaffes on Bush, Rush, life, etc. ..."

MCHENRY: Thanks For Clarifying, Patrick!

Liberal bloggers are criticizing Rep. McHenry for telling National Journal that the GOP's goal "is to bring down [the] approval numbers" of congressional Dems:

"'We will lose on legislation. But we will win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010,' said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., an outspoken conservative who has participated on the GOP message teams. 'Our goal is to bring down approval numbers for [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint.'"

Most liberal bloggers weren't surprised by McHenry's admission:

• TPM's Josh Marshall: "I mentioned a few days ago that congressional Republicans were simply not part of the conversation on saving the American economy. The policies they're pushing don't even amount to conservative. In most cases they're pushing stuff that's just transparently ridiculous. Like a federal spending freeze in the face of massive economic downturn and possible deflationary spiral. And now Greg Sargent has dug up a quote where a leading Republican admits that this is in fact their strategy. It's not about coming up with policies to save the country; it's all about pulling down Nancy Pelosi's and her caucus's favorability ratings. [...] That's not really surprising. But it's a bit stunning, though perhaps also refreshing, to see them say it out loud."
• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "The quote certainly won't surprise anyone who's paid any attention to the House Republican caucus over the last several years. Of course their goal is to bring down Democrats' approval numbers. Of course they're more concerned with winning the daily 'message war' than shaping public policy. [...] I can appreciate why all of this seems to be in the water-is-wet category for obviousness, but it's a reminder of why Democratic leaders are making a mistake if they plan on looking to the minority party as credible and sincere governing partners. As Joe Klein recently argued, the president 'should have no illusions about the good faith of his opponents.'"

That said, liberal bloggers were still highly critical of the GOP strategy as described by McHenry:

• Oliver Willis: "Patrick McHenry, a Republican rep from North Carolina, has told the press that his primary goal in Washington is to bring down approval ratings for Democrats. Now, my guess is that the people in his district in North Carolina sent him there to -- oh, I dunno -- represent North Carolina and not just use the House of Representatives as a campaign arm of the GOP."
• AMERICAblog's John Aravosis: "[The] GOP legislative priority isn't to pass any legislation to help America, it's to drive down Democratic poll numbers. [...] I guess when you're guaranteed a government-paid salary of $170k or so a year -- and get a raise just two months ago -- you can afford to focus on more important things than the health of the nation."

Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas thinks the GOP's strategy makes sense and that Dems should respond by "cut[ting] them out":

"This is what opposition parties do. They strive to make clear distinctions with the party in power, giving the American people a clear idea of how things might be different if the other guys were in power. Democrats had a hard time with this concept until 2005, when they finally found their voice opposing social security privatization, and 2006, when they did the same with Iraq. Republicans have never lost sight of their role, so good for them. [...] In 2010, the voters will pass judgment -- they'll either endorse Republican obstructionism by thinning the ranks of Congressional Democrats, or they'll punish recalcitrant Republicans by electing more Democrats. At that time, strategies can be adapted and evolved. But for now, the battle lines are clear, as are the strategies. Republicans aim to disrupt. Cut them out."

STEM CELL RESEARCH: The Rightroots Don't Agree With Nancy Reagan

Conservative bloggers continue to criticize Obama's decision to reverse Bush's restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research:

• NRO's Larry Kudlow: "As a Catholic I oppose Obama's actions. How can you destroy a life in order to save one? That's a key question Pres. Obama is not answering as he aborts Pres. Bush's ban on federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research. We already have existing stem-cell lines, plus blood cells and skin cells. So why must we seek new stem-cell lines from human embryos? [...] And why is taxpayer money necessary for this? That means those of us who oppose embryonic-stem-cell research -- for ethical, moral, or religious reasons -- must finance it. Why not leave all this to the private sector and private capital? That wouldn't make me any happier from a moral standpoint. But at least I wouldn't be paying for this research with my tax dollars."
• RedState's Mark Impomeni: "[T]he policy reversal exercised by the Obama Administration hasn't the least bit to do with ethics or science. If it did, Obama would likely have only modified the Bush policy slightly. Today's decision is about repaying the abortion industry, that's right I said industry, for its support of the most radically pro-abortion president in history."
• NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru: "To put taxpayer dollars behind the destruction of nascent human lives in research is monstrous. But Congress has long backed this policy, Barack Obama campaigned on it, and so it was only a matter of time before this evil day came. The decisions not to place any ethical limits on this subsidy and to rescind Bush's executive order encouraging ethical stem-cell research were, however, wholly gratuitous. President Obama did not have to do either thing out of political necessity. Evidently he just wanted to go as far down this road as he can. The likely next step is taxpayer support for research involving both the creation and the destruction of embryonic human lives."
• Townhall's Greg Hengler: "Science is amoral. It does not have anything to tell us about right or wrong, good or bad, etc. The bottom line is not scientific, it is whether the experimentation on human embryos (by the way, you were one at one point of your life) is right or wrong. Pres. Obama, please don't tell me about 'the science behind your decisions,' tell me about the morality behind your decisions. This lift [of Bush's restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research] is definitely change but not one I believe in."

Townhall's Matt Lewis thinks Obama's decision "will ultimately be viewed as a political miscalculation": "First, it stands to reason that Obama should be focused like a laser beam on fixing the economy. Yet, whether it is health care or embryonic stem cells (each day brings a new distraction from the economy), Obama continues to focus attention away from the economy. [...] Second, in 2008 Barack Obama won many young Evangelical votes by casting himself as a centrist. He also benefited from the fact that, in recent years, the culture wars have receded from the public attention. What Obama fails to understand is that cultural conservatives have only been successful when liberals were guilty of overreaching. [...] Third, while a minority of Americans may oppose this decision, polls fail to measure the intensity of those who oppose it."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Japan's "Lost Decade" Looks Better In Retrospect

The New York Times' Paul Krugman:

"For a decade or so Japan's lost decade has been the great bugaboo of modern macroeconomics. Economists constantly warned that you mustn't do X or you must do Y, because otherwise we'll turn into Japan. And policymakers congratulated themselves in advance for not being like their Japanese counterparts, who dithered and drifted, refusing to make hard decisions.

Well, I'm sure I'm not the only person to notice this: Japan doesn't look so bad these days. For one thing, the famed sluggishness of Japanese policy -- the refusal to face up to banking system losses and pour in the funds needed to recapitalize the system, the refusal to let zombie banks die, the stop-go nature of fiscal policy, with concerns about rising debt warring with concerns about the economy -- all of that seems entirely comprehensible now, doesn't it? Even with the knowledge of what happened to Japan to motivate us, so far we're following exactly the same path.

And given what the next couple of years are likely to look like, Japan's lost decade -- yes, growth was slow, but there wasn't mass unemployment or mass suffering -- is actually starting to look pretty good. We may or may not be about to face our own lost decade, but the sheer misery millions of Americans will face in the near future probably exceeds anything that happened in Japan during the 90s. I still hope we can do better than the Japanese did, but it's not at all obvious that we will."

LEST WE FORGET: Twitter/Facebook Syndrome

ESPN's Bill Simmons:

"In 15 years, writing went from 'reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts' to 'reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible' to 'reflecting on what's happening as it's happening' to 'here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you,' or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome. Do my friends REALLY CARE if I send out an update, 'Bill is flying on an airplane finishing a mailbag right now?' (Which is true, by the way.) I just don't think they would. I certainly wouldn't. That's why I refuse to use Twitter.

As for Facebook, I don't mind getting status updates and snapshots of what my friends' lives are like...as long as they aren't posting 10 times a day or writing something uncomfortable about their spouse/boyfriend like '(Girl's name) is...trying to remember the last time she looked at her husband without wanting to punch him in the face' or '(Girl's name) is...just going to keep eating, it's not like I have sex anymore.' Keep me out of your personal business, please. Other than that, the comedy of status updates can be off the charts. Like my college classmate who sends out status updates so overwhelmingly mundane and weird that my buddies and I forward them to each other, then add fake responses like, '(Guy's name)...snapped and killed a drifter tonight' and '(Guy's name)...would hang myself if the ceilings in my apartment weren't too short.' It kills us. We can't get enough of it. We have been doing it for four solid months. And really, that's what Facebook is all about -- looking at photos of your friend's kids or any reunion or party, making fun of people you never liked and searching for old hook-ups and deciding whether you regret the hook-up or not. That's really it. All in all, I like Facebook."

Posted by Ian Faerstein at March 10, 2009 12:45 PM