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Memo to Paul: Because he is a Freepucking Uckpublican
Dear Doctor Krugman
Krugman asks why nothing on health care from Obama. Do we really need to answer this question? Obama's priorities are:
1. Middle class tax cut (check)
2. War in Afghanistan (escalating!)
3. Slash Social Security and Medicare (summit on "entitlement reform" coming soon!)
Obama is what the Village wanted Bush to be, a "compassionate conservative." He's a Republican who doesn't hate gay people any more than is absolutely necessary for political purposes. Thus he can give on things like torture, Gitmo, the global gag rule, that is: money for contraception in other countries, just not in the US. The little things buy liberal love: equal pay, some union gifts. These small things get liberal votes for continuing to dismantle the New Deal.
In fact, Obama has already taken his steps on health care: computerize records, SCHIPS, and preparing to slash Medicare. What does this amount to? First the compassionate part: "cover the kids." The party line is that universalization will happen in steps. We covered the old people, we cover the kids, and it will get to everyone. Now we covered the old people in 1965, we passed SCHIPS this year. At this rate America will have universal health coverage around the same time as Nepal or the Congo.
But the real result of this is to put everyone in the system, so that a mandate will be able to find them. Their kids will be covered, their records will be on file, and they won't be able to get medicaid and medicare without paying in.
That's The Plan Paul: force everyone to pay in, so that any damage to insurance company profits is completely impossible.
Life under Obama is not going to be as nasty as life under Bush, but Obama is not a liberal except in so far as he needs to buy a few votes. However, this is already costing him politically. He started with 80% transition approval numbers. He reached 75% in early January. He came in to office with 70%. He is now at 65%. The trendline is straight down, because it wasn't approval it was preproval. Not surprisingly the very same small things that get him strong support among Democrats, are rapidly eroding his support among Republicans. Republicans now approve of Obama at the rate of 35% or so.
This isn't a problem politically: a 65% President has a broad mandate to pursue policies and get things done. But Obama's support is now entirely from the left, and from about half of the center. That's a very workable coalition, but it won't be workable when the collapse point comes. He's got some Friedman Units as Liberals tell themselves "he has a secret liberal plan! He's black I tell you, that means he is liberal." What his race has to do with his politics is beyond me, I have to leave that to more connected people than I am, because I've known plenty of African-Americans who are in the mold of Alan Keyes, Lynn Swann, Clarence Thomas, and so on.
Should he be doing something about health care? Of course. He just missed a huge chance in the stimulus bill to put in projects that would have made universalization easier and cheaper. What better time to train people than in a recession when jobs are scarce? What better time to build facilities? But it was decided that corporate tax breaks and "a middle class tax cut" were more important.
Paul, I know that you and lots of other people want to have influence with President Obama, and you are being nice. Now you know why people kissed up to Bush at the same time you were looking at his numbers and seeing that it didn't add up. That is where I am now: Obama's numbers only add up if you assume that he is right of center "centrist" willing to give on small liberal issues, but is basically a Reaganite on economics, who is most concerned with protecting America's financial system, and who believes in military power above domestic investment.
My reading of Obama, which others vehemently disagree with, but cannot point to a single counter-example of, is that he learns everything the hard way, he does not change his mind until there has been a catastrophic failure of his hardened ideology, and even then it is a minimal change. Consider the history of his support for stimulus. Or his proposals on health care. Consider his repetition of bi-partisanship, and then he can't even deliver a single Republican vote for a pre-compromised stimulus bill. And yet, there is no sign that he is going to change direction.
Obama is also not a progressive, nor is he really digital. Much is made of his blackberry, but in terms of governing method, Obama is a top downer. That means a few guys make decisions, and then they figure out how to sell them. They want information from the bottom, but they don't change direction based on an interactive sense of the bottom. This top down style is all 20th century. Obama's world has no room for any center of power but Obama. It is about control. He's just willing to use new tools to get that control, and he spends more money on them. Obama is a pyramid President: he sits at the top of that pyramid, and everyone marches to it. The problem with the pyramid is that it is too expensive to run. Obama is going to have to gut the rest of the economy to keep our very expensive financial pyramid in place, and he is sucking virtually every loose quarter in the left to fund his political pyramid. Obama is no different in political organization than George W. Bush, merely more technologically savvy. He is not the web, he is TV 2.0 - the paradigm that the pop era power structure has wanted to get to for some time. Here it is, in color, High Definition, with surround sound.
Obama is a one termer, because the Republican Party will never go along with sensible policies, and Obama is going to erode his own political base. Obama is like the invasion of Iraq: almost no one has the guts to defy him from his own side, and yet privately, many people are angry at how far to the right he has run. This hasn't shown up in polling yet, but it is waiting for his first major stumble. It comes out when he shafts some group on some small thing, like contraception for poor women in the stimulus bill.
The other reality is that while people want Obama to work out, they don't like his actual policies. The support for escalation in Afghanistan, is poor, and almost non-existent among the young. The support for his version of health care, ranks below other ideas. The support for his "middle class tax cut" is also thin and below more spending. Taken individually Obama is a 51% President at best - and that is where his approval number will reach at the cross roads some 3 years from now, because basically, that's what happens to almost every President. At that point, the bad decisions he is making now, with the resurgence of TARP - that is the government taking on toxic assets - will haunt him. I remember you talking about the idiocy of the theory behind buying up toxic waste on the taxpayer dime. Or lack of theory more exactly. Well there it is.
The most important principle of Obama is "no rich people shall come to harm." Sure they have to give up some bonuses and private jets, but everyone who was in charge, will stay in charge. The people, get the responsibility and the sacrifice, and the loose change from the bankers as they stride boldly to their jobs.
You want a liberal President. The problem is that America needed to deal with it's 1960s racial and sexual angst. The contest between Hillary and Obama was reduced to gender versus race. In the end the administration's economic team is packed with Clintonians and Hamilton Project graduates. The reason so many in the blogosphere are trashing Bob Rubin is that he is safely out of the hallowed circle and out of power, but really, they are trashing Clintonomics and the financial play.
The way the campaign was run XX v Melonin was hardly what I would call a particularly strong way of determining who is liberal. Since the Democratic Party chose to nominate it's most conservative major candidate, there was no hope for a liberal in the White House, there is no hope for liberal policies from this White House beyond not being mean and crazy, and people need to just accept that it is going to be another 12 to 16 years before we get another crack at it.
Sorry, your generation screwed up, and there isn't anything to be done about it.
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