Obama keeps one of Bush’s worst habits – politics over policy

Ryan Grim lays it out, Mayberry Machiavellis: Obama Political Team Handcuffing Recovery.  Here’s a big chunk of it, it’s long and the whole article should be read by all.

Under the leadership of President George W. Bush, science, empirical evidence and expert advice struggled to be heard above the din of politics. It’s one thing to prioritize politics over good policy; it’s quite another to let bad politics drive the agenda. But that’s what the Bush administration did during its Terri Schiavo era and his congressional majorities paid the price.

Today, a new band of Mayberry Machiavellis has gained control, counseling President Obama to ignore the advice of his economic team and press forward with deficit reduction ahead of job creation.

Senior White House adviser David Axelrod told the New York Times recently that “it’s my job to report what the public mood is.” The public mood, said Axelrod, is anti-spending and anti-deficit and so the smart politics is to alleviate those concerns. “I’ve made the point that as a matter of policy and a matter of politics that we need to focus on this, and the president certainly agrees with that,” said Axelrod of the deficit hawkery that the administration has engaged in over the last several months.

It’s an odd political strategy because Axelrod knows that if it succeeds, it will be both bad policy and bad politics. He said as much when asked about the pressure from economic advisers to focus on stimulus and job creation. “I’m very much allied with the economic group, because even as a political matter it would be very shortsighted to take steps that would send us backward,” he said.

But the Mayberries have already taken those steps: by using the bully pulpit to highlight deficit fears, by proposing an across-the-board spending freeze, by creating a commission to reduce the deficit and stacking it with hawks, by making it clear to progressive allies that the White House political team believes a deficit-reduction focus is important for the midterm elections. The one recent effort by the President to pressure Congress to move forward with jobs-related spending came in a letter sent on a Saturday evening that was met with derision on the Hill for its ham-handedness.

[UPDATE: White House aide Matthew Vogel responds: “When President Obama took office, millions of people had already lost their jobs due to the recession and the deficit had ballooned. Over the last eighteen months, the economic team and the President’s closest advisors have worked day and night to balance two of the greatest challenges our economy faces — putting Americans back to work and getting us back on a sustainable fiscal path. The Administration is united in its focus on getting the economy growing again, the most powerful driver of job creation and deficit reduction.”]

The focus on deficits has consequences. Without White House backing of more stimulus, the House of Representatives has steadily hacked away at a jobs package that began as a several hundred billion dollar initiative and is now a shell of itself. The Senate, meanwhile, has repeatedly failed to break a GOP filibuster of extended unemployment insurance and a must-pass package of tax extenders faces the prospect of not passing.

Axelrod’s political analysis — that “as a political matter it would be very shortsighted to take steps that would send us backward” — is confirmed by a recent survey that is being studied by both House Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats gathered on Thursday morning to dig into the national poll, which was paid for by the Alliance for American Manufacturing and done by Democrat Mark Mellman and Republican Whit Ayers.

It hints at an answer to why people are so passionate when asked by pollsters about the deficit: It’s about jobs, China and American decline. If the job situation improves, worries about the deficit will dissipate. Asking whether Congress should address the deficit or the jobless crisis, therefore, is the wrong question.

The survey finds extensive worry about U.S. indebtedness to China, which is seen as eclipsing America on the international stage, signaling the twilight of U.S. dominance and economic underperformance as the new status quo. “There’s no question in my mind that the intensity of concern about this problem is related to the overall economic picture,” said Mellman.

The national debt and the deficit are both proxies for concern about the economic decline. “There’s very little understanding of the difference between the debt and the deficit,” said Mellman, who has briefed Democratic lawmakers on polling around the deficit. “When people are talking about the deficit and being concerned about the deficit, that’s really a metaphor for a whole lot of things in their mind: It’s about debt to China, it’s also about the waste of government money as far as they’re concerned, it’s about bailing out big corporations while their jobs are lost.”

It’s became apparent several many years ago – over a decade if not longer – that 0ne of  the main problems facing our country was that we had failed to, or ignored, making the needed investments, (R&D, infrastructure to name two), to provide the basis for the economic growth needed for the future.  Essentially our government was hijacked by government bad, corporations good, free market types that forgot to plan for the future.  I would encourage everyone to read the above article about the White House but also go watch Paul Krugman on the Charlie Rose (July 2nd) show last week, and read Nouriel Roubini’s latest.

Again, this is another area where Obama was supposed to be different from Bush.  To lead, and to lead change, he needs to be out there almost daily teaching the American people, and explaining to them why this is necessary.  But that’s not Obama, (see below).  He’s much more likely to try and find the mythical “middle ground” that’s going to wind up being bad for working people and the middle class.

[UPDATE]: Certainly as Anne Lowrey points out at TWI, Shrinking Labor Force Masks Deepening Jobless Crisis, we could find something for these peple to do.  Certainly there are some public works projects, WPA style, that these people could do to get money churning in the economy again.

Much of the coverage of the June labor market report released on Friday focused on the drop in the unemployment rate, from 9.7 to 9.5 percent, or the 83,000 private-sector jobs created. But the headline numbers hid the reason for the dip in unemployment: not more jobs, but fewer workers. Walker, like 652,000 others across the country, is jobless and has not looked for a position during the past four weeks — and therefore has officially been reclassified as a “discouraged” worker, a person “marginally attached to the labor force,” rather than an unemployed one.

“I’ll start looking again when things turn up,” she says. “And my husband is still looking. Both of us are willing to do just about any job at this point.”

These discouraged workers are part of a broad, and troubling, phenomenon. During the first four months of the year, 1.7 million workers flooded the job market, heartened by good economic news. But in the past two months, as the recovery has faltered, nearly a million workers have fallen back out.