What Obama should have done in 2009

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Given the way things played out in '09, I tend to think that an attempt to split stimulus into a series of successive bills that frontloaded tax cuts and tried to get other pieces in through later bills would have led to either the Democrats in House and Senate not getting on board (the mostly likely response to such an idea had it been entertained at the time) or the passing of the first one or two of the pieces of legislation and the rest failing in a lot of very public wrangling and making very loud thuds when they hit the ground.  I'm skeptical of how that would have helped Obama create a different sort of "narrative" or made him look any more like a leader.

It's easy to argue that Obama should have held his guns on health care reform or taken an incremental approach in hindsight.  But I think the tenuous nature of the the 60 votes in the Senate accompanied by the insistence of liberal Dems who had helped Obama get elected combined with the fact that comprehensive health care reform is one of the biggest elephants in the room when it comes to the economic future of the U.S. all conspired to push into the front of the line.

I kind of take it as an object lesson in wave elections that result in effective supermajorities.  It puts the incumbent in the debt of so many people who hopped in his ship, and in exchange, they demand to drive the boat for a while.  There is, in the meantime, too little incentive to sit down with everyone in crafting good legislation, and the compromises that do get made in the process tend to be directed at the wishes of the most influential committee members (the tax cuts in the stimulus largely came at Grassley's urging, but they had very little if any stimulative effect and Grassley in the end didn't even vote for the bill--having gotten what he wanted, he reserved the right to campaign against it later!), and so those compromises lead to further legislative incoherence.  It doesn't help, of course, that Obama didn't know then, and doesn't know yet, how to create sensible long-term economic policies.  All the same, the somewhat unexpectedly dire nature of the crisis combined with the structural demons that effective supermajorities give birth to led to some quite unfortunate results.  Results like this come about through the deeds of more than just one person, even when that one person is the president.   

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Not only did Bush '43 partly base his first "compassionate conservative" campaign on continuation of entitlement funding (remember his critique of Gore "trying to turn Medicare into Mediscare"?) but he spearheaded the Medicare Part D plan through Congress, despite objections from people like Coburn, so he could ensure a lock in Florida in his reelect. 

But, I do agree with Torie that Obama, having made a big deal of giving Simpson-Bowles its marching orders after GOP Senators bolted on it, should have embraced its findings and approach in the budget negotiations of last year.  It would have been THAT, and not any hypothetical redo of 2009, that would have allowed him to change the narrative of this election, whether Congress would have allowed the plan to pass or not.

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How do you think the narrative would be different now?

It has taken a while to sink in with me, because I'm dumb, but I have come around to thinking that, if there was at least one substantive takeaway message from the 2010 election results, it was that people were beginning to worry not just about the economic recovery, which requires growth and not just government spending, but also about how much debt was piling up,  And the thing about Simpson-Bowles that it seems to me is often overlooked is that the changes in spending and program structure are phased in over decades going forward--they don't gut everything right away.  I think, if Obama had gotten behind Simpson-Bowles or something largely like it, he would have been able to say that he had his eye on both short-term recovery and long-term debt reduction.  That's a pretty big bite out of the opponents' message, it seems to me.

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Could be Bull Moose.  Polls even among self-identified TEA-party supporters show both broad-ranging support for debt reduction and broad-ranging opposition to entitlement cuts.  I just suspect that, if you support a concrete plan put together by your own appointed commission and the other side blocks it, you can lay clear blame on them for it.  If you don't back the recommendations of your own appointed commission, it's a lot easier for the other side to accuse you of being asleep at the switch.  And yes, I know all the details about the Medicare cuts and the budget negotiations.  But I'm just talking about the way stuff plays with the public.