I don't know, man. Yes, liberals go back and write about what Obama should have done all the time, but conservatives like Trende writing about it leaves a bad taste. It seems like gloating, patronizing. You haven't won the election
yet, guys.
And it's bad enough when liberals do it, because they're usually wrong. The effect of Monday-morning quarterbacking is demoralizing. It makes you want to put your head down under your hands in a mix of resignation and embarassment, like those Captain Picard images you see posted sometimes to indicate frustration.
Because the implication is that one, Obama failed, and two, that the person doing the writing knew better and would have done better, even though the person in question is looking at things from retrospect and only has to write an article about what would be done, but would never have to actually do it.
Take Trende's conviction that a second stimulus would have been possible. His analysis is unconvincing. First, he argues that since Democrats were able to pass a highly controversial and eventually unpopular health care reform bill, a second stimulus should have been possible.
However, this ignores the fact that there's a difference between passing something one time, and passing a second version or something previously passed. Not passing health care reform would have been an admission of failure of sorts, like the failure to pass to any Energy legislation, or the failure to tackle Immigration reform. Once Obama had taken it up, the entire fortune of his Presidency resided on the basis of
something getting passed, and the entire interest of the opposition lay in it being defeated. Thus, there was
massive incentive upon the 60 Democratic Senators to stay unified in support of a bill, and massive incentive upon the 40-41 Republican Senators to stay unified in opposition. Additionally, Republicans tend to underestimate the spectre of 1994 on the Democrats' thinking. The reason why 1994 was so humiliating is not that the Democrats lost Congress after 40 years, but that they lost Congress in spite of not passing anything. The 1994 election ended the promise of the Clinton Presidency, despite his reelection and despite Trende's attempts to praise Clinton's later smaller legislative accomplishments. Democrats, from the White House down, haunted by the memory of 1994, and the symbolism that a failure on health care would be, were more determined than ever to pass it.
None of these factors would have been in play for a second stimulus. Democrats would not have seen a second stimulus, as being as critical since one had already been passed. It would have just been a numbers game. And Republicans would have no interest in supporting it, since their entire narrative at the time was that stimulus was ineffective. That this article lacks a connection with reality is driven home by Trende's comment that the Obama administration adopt "the Romer-Bernstein chart, as adapted by conservative bloggers". First of all, that was a rightwing propaganda point, highly misleading because when the original Romer-Bernstein chart was developed, the unemployment rate was already at the highest level on the chart (which was not projected until later). In other words, by the time the chart was created, existing conditions
already made it out of date. The inaccuracy was solely due to the fast-moving conditions of late 2008/early 2009, which were deteriorating so quickly that a few months' delay in macroeconomic data had a significant difference. But conservatives exploited this difference to argue that the stimulus was ineffective. So basically Trend was saying, that the Democrats should have used a conservative Republican propaganda image designed to undercut support for stimulus, to argue for more stimulus on behalf of the Democratic President!
Most important of all though, is that the primary determinant of whether a second shot of something is worthwhile is whether the first shot of it seemed successful. Trende seems to be admitting that stimulus does indeed help the economy. Is he a Keynesian? Conservatives are the ones who killed a second stimulus in late 2009, because they argued that stimulus, in general, was ineffective. And they would not have supported a second one in late 2009, health care bill or no, because they would have been too busy arguing that the first was ineffective.
As it is, all comprehensive economic studies from non-ideological entities of both the public and private sector find that the stimulus was effective, and it doesn't appear that there were the votes there for a larger one.
As for health care reform, I give the President great credit for getting something passed, and less credit for his skill in selling what he passed. But the first is not to be underestimated. The Democrats had a very narrow window from when Al Franken was sworn in until when Scott Brown was sworn in, to pass something, and they did it. Waiting any longer would have meant no bill.
Finally, as to why financial reform took so long (it was seriously taken up immediately after health care and passed in mid-2010, not late 2010 as Trende says), a lot of it had to do with the amount of time that it took to study the complicated issues involved. The main problem with financial reform is not that it took so long, but it was being debated at a time when the financial system was still extremely fragile. Witness the difficulties the banks are having today anticipating the Basel III requirements, and the delays that the authorities in China are taking in enforcing tougher bank requirements, as they try to stimulate lending. Hence, a fairly strong bill looked possible with a push from progressive Senators in April of 2010, but the onset of the Greek crisis spooked legislators and in the end, many of the tricky issues were kicked to the Federal Reserve and the regulatory process.
