Note: this is a guest post from Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, offering his own take on the debate over President Obama’s handling of the stimulus legislation. We invite and intend to publish different points of view on this subject, as part of our continuing debate on the extent to which Democrats should accomodate, on philosophical, strategic or tactical grounds, “bipartisan” approaches to the administration’s agenda.
The stimulus plan, President Obama’s first serious attempt to change the way Washington works, is hitting a stonewall of partisan rigidity. Republicans are the worst offenders, but Obama is also getting strafed from his left.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman came out blasting yesterday, all but calling the president a postpartisan wimp.
Obama’s stimulus plan, he said, is too small to plug the hole in our economy created by faltering private demand. And he chided the president for allowing a bipartisan group of Senate moderates to strip various provisions out of the House bill. In language that could qualify for a Pulitzer Prize in hyperbole, Krugman claimed that the dastardly centrists would kill hundreds of thousands of jobs and cut vital health care and food programs, while offering new a fat tax break to affluent homeowners.
On food stamps and aid to states, Krugman makes a fair point. But some of the education provisions are more questionable and the housing credit, properly targeted on first-time homebuyers, could help to halt the slide in housing prices. In general, Krugman’s outrage seems out of proportion to the actual differences between the House and Senate bills.
If size matters, as Krugman insists, it’s worth pointing out that the Senate plan is bigger ($827 billion vs. the House’s $819 billion). Many economists believe that the plan’s details matter less than its scale, because they believe what’s essential now is to boost the confidence and “animal spirits” of U.S. consumers, businesses and lenders.
Besides, the House and Senate are very different institutions and are almost always going to serve up different versions of bills. Reconciling them is why we have legislative conferences. What’s more, Obama only has 58 Democratic votes in the Senate, two shy of a filibuster-proof majority. He needs to pick up a handful of GOP votes to get the bill into conference. The real world choice we face is not between $827 billion and whatever larger figure Krugman believes Washington must spend to rescue the economy, but between roughly $800 billion and a smaller package.
What really seems to bug Krugman, though, is Obama’s postpartisan vision. Instead of wasting time reaching out to Republicans, the president ought to reach for a baseball bat. By strenuous campaigning against GOP obstructionism, Obama could remind voters of why they liked him in the first place, and turn up the heat on his conservative opponents. The problem with that theory is that voters responded powerfully to Obama’s promise to end partisan paralysis in Washington rather than pursue a Democratic version of the Rovian strategy of maximum feasible polarization.
It is galling, of course, to hear Hill Republicans assert that they are simply standing on their “small government” principles. This would be more convincing if the party hadn’t colluded in an orgy of earmarking, borrowing and spending during the Bush years – crowned by a new $8 trillion prescription drug entitlement for seniors.
Perhaps, as Krugman complains, Obama waited too long before countering GOP attempts to conflate stimulus with pork.
But in eschewing the strident partisanship that many on the left pine for, Obama is keeping faith with the people who elected him. He’s also maneuvering the Republicans into a position where they appear as dogmatic, lock-step partisans –and politically impotent to boot, since they can’t block a big stimulus bill from passing. And let’s face it: While the president has tried to foster a new spirit of comity and cooperation, the stimulus plans make very few concessions to GOP demands when you look at the big picture.
So let’s all take a deep breath. If progressives want Obama to succeed, they need to avoid ideological purism and reflexive partisanship, and give their new president the tactical leeway he needs to maneuver around Washington’s formidable obstacles to change.

There’s been a lot of highly critical commentary over the last few days about the thundering absence of any clear policy rationale underlying the $100 billion or so in reductions in the economic stimulus package secured by the so-called “centrist” group of senators. Today’s Washington Post op-ed by one of that group, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) hasn’t exactly helped matters.
Yes, Specter cites a couple of cuts (Title I education spending, preventive health measure) and suggests that they represent types of spending that would be nice, but can’t be afforded right now. Why? Because they add up to the amount of money that Specter and company have arbitrarily decided must be cut from the legislation. It’s a classic example of circular reasoning. Or if you prefer, as Ross Douthat put it, Spector possesses a “mind incapable of thinking about policy in any terms save these: Take what the party in power wants, subtract as much money as you can without infuriating them, vote yes, and declare victory.” Similarly, Jonathan Chait observes:

It’s not like there’s some firm cap that forced the Senate to cut helpful spending programs. The cap is there because Specter decided to put it there, an act that flies in the face of the very economic theory that justifies the bill in the first place.

More specifically, unless I’ve missed it, the “centrist” group has yet to offer any sort of explanation for why aid to budget-strapped state governments took such a conspicuous hit in their “compromise.” I mean, the fiscal crises affecting nearly all of the states are real. The recession-deepening cuts they are already making in personnel, in infrastructure programs, and in direct services to low-income Americans, are very real. Do the “centrists” think there’s enough money in the package as amended to head off these highly unhelpful developments, or do they just not care? Who knows?
A cynic might observe that all of the four senators that Arlen Specter identifies as the organizers of the “centrist” coup-by-amendment–himself, Ben Nelson, Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman–happen to come from states where the governor is of the other party.
But another factor, particularly given the timing, might have been a strange little statement put out by the Republican Governors’ Association last Thursday urging Congress to reject the stimulus legislation entirely, because governors really didn’t need the money. In quotes from RGA chairman Mark Sanford of SC, Gov. Sarah Palin of AK, Gov. Rick Perry of TX, Gov. Bobby Jindal of LA, and Gov. Haley Barbour of MS, the statement complained vaguely about “strings and mandates” accompanying the bill (although much of it either increases the federal share of costs for existing programs, or, in the case of the single largest program killed by the “centrists,” made $25 billion available for absolutely anything the states wanted to do), and called instead for tax cuts. This maneuver was obviously intended to undercut a statement made a week or so earlier by the bipartisan National Governors’ Association asking Congress to act quickly on the stimulus legislation–and noting the urgency of aid to states–and scattered press reports that many Republican governors were at least privately expressing support to Obama.
Mark Sanford has been so adamant in his opposition to what he calls a “bailout” of the states that Rep. Jim Clyburn from SC secured language in the House version of the stimulus bill allowing state legislatures to bypass governors and apply for federal assistance if the governor refuses to do so.
I don’t know if the “centrist” senators or their staffs read any of this “don’t help us” stuff, but it makes about as much sense as any other explanation of the specific steps they took to reshape the stimulus legislation.

The Republican echo chamber has been working overtime, trying to stampede a backlash against the Obama stimulus package. But the publlic is apparently not buying it. A Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of 1200 LV’s in 40 competitive House districts conducted last week, for example, found that 64 percent of respondents supported President Obama’s stimulus package, with 27 percent opposed. In addition, 57 percent agreed that the recovery package is needed now. Even better, as Andy Barr notes in his Politico report on stimulus polls,

Asked if they would be more or less likely to support an incumbent if they voted for the stimulus, 27 percent of respondents to Greenberg’s poll said more likely, 15 percent said less likely and 53 percent said it would make no difference.

As the GOP and their minions in the media (see our Saturday staff post) press for an early end to the Obama Administration ‘honeymoon,’ it is proving to be a very tough sell. As GQR head and TDS co-editor Stan Greenberg put it, “Voters overwhelmingly believe they are living with an economy that is the product of Bush and the Republicans.”

Maybe it’s the decade or so I spent working in federal-state relations for three Georgia governors, or maybe it’s just that I’m amazed at how little specific information is being provided in the MSM about the cuts made in the Nelson-Collins amendment to the Senate economic recovery/stimulus bill, but I decided to do some digging and calculations about the “$40 billion in state aid cuts” that are mentioned in most of the stories.
The original House-Senate “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” was set at $79 billion over two years. After a small rakeoff for territories and administration, it was divided roughly into $39 billion to the states (with a pass-through to school districts for unused funds) to restore prior state education cuts; a $15 billion “state incentives grant” program keyed to progress towards state education goals (presumably those set by No Child Left Behind); and then a $25 billion fund that could literally go to any state function, including education. This last flexible fund is basically general revenue sharing, though unlike the old Nixon-era program, it all goes to the states.
The amendment killed the flexible fund entirely; cut the “state incentive grant” fund in half (to $7.5 billion); and then left the remaining $31 billion in the fund distributed to offset state education cuts. So in the state fiscal stabilization section alone, the $40 billion cut everybody’s talking about involves $25 billion in flexible money and $15 billion in education funding.
There are obviously some separate cuts in education spending, though much of it is in school construction funding that presumably doesn’t affect operating budgets, though it does reduce the stimulative effect of the overall bill.
Additionally, though I missed it earlier, the original Senate bill cut out a House-passed $1 billion temporary increase in appropriations for the Community Development Block Grant, which is the most flexible money that would have been available to local governments.
All this matters because one of the original rationales of the entire legislation was that state and local government service and personnel cuts would undercut the stimulative effect of the federal effort.
States (and indirectly, local governments) will still benefit considerably from other elements of the bill as enacted by the Senate, most notably the estimated $87 billion that would be made available through temporary federal matching rates for the Medicaid program. But if the Nelson-Collins amendment sticks through the House-Senate conference (a very good bet given the one-vote-cushion the bill seems to have in the Senate), the flexible money is gone, and education has taken a pretty big hit.
If you want to strain your eyes by staring at the bill as it now stands in the Senate, go here. And the best detailed summary of the cuts made in the original Senate bill and the Nelson-Collins amendment, the National Conference of State Legislatures has a spread-sheet in a new article on its site.

Those who hoped that the proliferation of cable news programs would lead to more balanced news coverage for progressives found no comfort in a report issued last week by ThinkProgress.org:

…In the debate over the House economic recovery bill on the five cable news networks, Republican members of Congress outnumbered their Democratic counterparts by a ratio of 2 to 1.The analysis tallied interview segments about the stimulus on CNBC, Fox Business, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC during a three-day period, finding that the networks had hosted Republican lawmakers 51 times and Democratic lawmakers only 26 times.

And in a more recent analysis, not much improvement:

ThinkProgress has found that Republican lawmakers outnumbered Democratic lawmakers 75 to 41 on cable news interviews by members of Congress (from 6am on Monday 2/2 through 11pm on Thursday 2/5)

ThinkProgress notes also that,

Last week, Fox News came the closest to balance with 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. But the so-called “fair and balanced” network was not able to maintain such a ratio this week, hosting 24 Republicans and only 11 Democrats.
The business news networks were particularly egregious this week. CNBC had more than twice as many conservatives, with 14 Republicans and 6 Democrats. Fox Business was even worse, hosting 20 Republicans for just 4 Democrats.

Worse, ThinkProgress adds:

Though the imbalance is already stark, the tilt of the coverage would have been even more lopsided if the analysis had been broken down into whether a lawmaker who appeared on TV was a supporter or a critic of the economic recovery plan. Some of the most frequent Democratic guests this week were outspoken critics of the proposed stimulus plans, such as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Kent Conrad (D-ND).

Hard to see it any other way than Big Media wanting to undermine the President, whether for ratings or naked political bias. Leftside Annie, one of the more than 500 respondents to the ThinkProgress post said it well: “Liberal Media? Bullshite.”

There are two places where the “pretend to be crazy” strategy is a pretty standard ploy – in street fights or barroom brawls on the one hand and “big bluff” business negotiations on the other.
Oh, wait a minute. There are actually three places. The third one is in the Republican Party.
In a street fight or barroom brawl the essence of the strategy is to have carefully cultivated a reputation for barely contained psychotic anger and utterly reckless disregard for consequences. The person using this strategy counts on potential challengers begin told by their friends “hey man, you don’t want to mess with that guy, he’s flat-out crazy. He might do anything”
In “big bluff” business negotiations the strategy is to feign an irrational, “over the top” attitude toward some particular contract provision or financial offer. This is usually packaged with a particularly florid or sanguinary metaphor e.g. “I’d rather cut off my right arm and throw it in the nearest garbage can than sign an incredibly stupid contract like that.” Operatic flourishes of this kind tend to derail any attempts to discuss the issue calmly and rationally.
The Republican Party’s version of the “pretend to be crazy” strategy is a mixture of the two approaches – a combination of reckless indifference to the real-world consequences of some stance and a theatrical refusal to seriously discuss realistic solutions.
There’s a long history of the use of this strategy in the Republican Party. Milton Friedman’s original “starve the beast” strategy was essentially to push the American government into bankruptcy by offering tax cut after tax cut without any regard for normal fiscal prudence or responsible management of the economy. This, it was assumed, would finally force government to cut programs that conservative Republicans disliked but that the electorate strongly supported. Later on, in the 1990’s there was Newt Gingrich’s “shutdown” of the federal government to extort his agenda – a mixture of bluff and irresponsibility that backfired when Bill Clinton refused to play along.
Today’s version of this approach is dramatically on display in the total disregard the Republicans are showing for the potentially profound economic damage their legislative brinksmanship can cause and the near-infantile way in which they play with words on the subject – “spending isn’t stimulus”, “this is a spending bill not a economic recovery bill” and so on rather than seriously discussing the realistic economic choices that must be made.
There is no “one-size-fits-all” counter-strategy for dealing with the “pretend you’re crazy” approach, but there is one good rule of thumb — Democrats should explicitly point out the game that is being played. They should say clearly:
“The reason the Republicans feel free to act in such an incredibly irresponsible way in this difficult situation is that they are counting on President Obama and the Democrats to behave responsibly and bail them out. Their behavior resembles the spoiled teen-ager who gets arrested again and again because he knows his father is a judge who will always get him off.”
The essence of this counter-strategy is to redefine what the Republicans want to call a stance based on “principles” as a stance that is instead fundamentally childish and irresponsible. To most Americans, engaging in serious negotiation and seeking reasonable compromise in a difficult situation like the present one represents “adult” or “grown-up” behavior. Politicians who refuse to engage in such activities are therefore, essentially behaving like children.

Allow me to be the umpteenth blogger to recommend for your reading pleasure the remarks that President Obama made yesterday to the House Democratic Caucus retreat.
I do not share the widespread view that these remarks represent some sort of late realization by Obama that bipartisanship is a waste of time, or that he made a mistake not just seeking to ram a Democratic-drafted stimulus package through Congress. In the pertinent passage in his speech, he is simply separating the sheep from the goats–the phony “bipartisan debate” that involves Republicans denouncing the very idea of economic stimulus and/or denouncing refundable tax cuts as “welfare,” from a genuine give-and-take”

I don’t think any of us have cornered the market on wisdom, or that do I believe that good ideas are the province of any party. The American people know that our challenges are great. They’re not expecting Democratic solutions or Republican solutions — they want American solutions. And I’ve said that same thing to the public, and I’ve said that, in a gesture of friendship and goodwill, to those who have disagreed with me on aspects of this plan.
But what I have also said is — don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis. (Applause.) You know, all of us here — imperfect. And everything we do and everything I do is subject to improvement. Michelle reminds me every day how imperfect I am. (Laughter.) So I welcome this debate. But come on, we’re not — we are not going to get relief by turning back to the very same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin. (Applause.)
We can’t embrace the losing formula that says only tax cuts will work for every problem we face; that ignores critical challenges like our addiction to foreign oil, or the soaring cost of health care, or falling schools and crumbling bridges and roads and levees. I don’t care whether you’re driving a hybrid or an SUV — if you’re headed for a cliff, you’ve got to change direction. (Applause.) That’s what the American people called for in November, and that’s what we intend to deliver. (Applause.)
So the American people are watching. They did not send us here to get bogged down with the same old delay, the same old distractions, the same talking points, the same cable chatter.

I do agree with those who say that this is the sort of speech the President needs to be making to a broader audience, including the country as a whole.

Carl Hulse has a New York Times report on the emergence of a bipartisan “Gang of 20,” Senate moderates led by Republican Susan Collins and Democrat Ben Nelson, while David Brooks casts a hopeful eye in his column on the Gang of 20 as a possible harbinger of a new way of doing political business on the Hill. Democratic Leadership Council President Bruce Reed sees the Gang of 20 as a “promising post-partisan caucus” in his Slate article today and sees Obama gathering strength as a result of the struggles of the last week.
The Southern Political Report‘s Tom Baxter takes a look at the schitzy way the stimulus debate is being addressed by the region’s Republican governors.
At The Blog for Our Future (CAF), Charles McMillion nukes “The ‘FDR Failed’ Myth” being bandied about by Republican spinmeisters to discredit arguments for government spending.
David Corn’s MoJo Blog makes the case that President “Obama needs to Get Outside the Beltway.”
Alan Abramowitz joins the fray over the political ramification of the economic meltdown for the November election at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, with a strong data-based argument that the meltdown was not the pivotal factor.
At Daily Kos Meteor Blades takes a sobering look at the new unemployment figures, while Angry Bear‘s Spencer has a post arguing that we are experiencing “the worst employment drop in the post WW II era.”
With FiveThirtyEight.com‘s Nate Silver on the case, we’ll have no more whining about Democratic party unity, at least with respect to the stimulus package.
And for your Friday amusement, Firedoglake‘s Christy Hardin Smith has collected a “boo yah sampling of smackdowns” from “across the internets.”

Anybody trying to follow what’s happening in the Senate on the stimulus package today is having a bad case of vertigo. The big news yesterday seemed to be that Senate Dems didn’t have the votes to enact the stimulus legislation that was reported out of its committees, and that was roughly similar to what the House enacted. As a result, a self-designated group of “centrists”–apparently five GOPers and up to 15 Democrats–had convened under the leadership of Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Susan Collins (R-ME) to agree on modifications of the package that would reduce its cost and/or eliminate objectionable “pork.”
Now today, even as details of the Nelson-Collins “agreed-to-cuts” leaks out (TPM seems to have the first copy), Harry Reid has dramatically announced that he has the votes to cut off debate and enact a bill. The question, of course, is “what bill?”, though comments by other Democratic senators suggest that they are not including the Nelson-Collins cuts, much less the sort of larger cuts that Collins undoubtedly wants. And that in turn implies that all or nearly all of the Dems involved in the Nelson-Collins negotiations have been, or can be, convinced to vote for the bigger package (inflated to over $900 billion yesterday when the Senate approved an Isakson amendment to give big tax incentives to home-buyers), and that a couple of Republicans other than Collins (Snowe? Voinovich? Specter?) are on board as well.
If the Nelson-Collins cuts–again, a tentative list, not an agreement, since Collins is insisting on much larger cuts–is somehow in play, it’s worth looking at them in some detail. And the first thing that jumps out at you is that $39 billion of the $79 billion in proposed cuts comes from elimination of a State Fiscal Stabilization Fund.
There have already been some blog posts erroneously describing these proposed cuts as relating purely to “education.” That’s because the Department of Education administers this proposed fund. $15 billion on the chopping block is in the form of “state incentive grants” that are indeed about education (apparently aimed at rewarding states that make progress towards their education goals), but the bigger chunk, $24 billion, is the sole unrestricted money for the states in the entire stimulus package, aimed at discouraging states from laying off workers and cutting programs in a way that would undermine the very purpose of the federal legislation. To be sure, there are other funds in the stimulus package aimed at shoring up specific state-administered programs, particularly Medicaid, but the $24 billion the “centrists” are lopping off is the only truly flexible money.
I would guess that lobbyists for state and local government have figured this out and are raising holy hell about it by now. But the fact that so little is known about the composition of the Nelson-Collins group (as Chris Bowers rightly and angrily points out), and no one outside the Senate seems to know whether these negotiated cuts are in or out of what Reid intends to push on the Senate floor, is a sign of how incredibly confusing the legislative dance has become at this crucial moment.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

In the course of about 48 hours, the conventional wisdom about the likely fate of the economic stimulus packagage has undergone a remarkable change from guarded optimism to quasi-panic. In a semi-ironic reference to the rapidly shifting winds, Mike Madden did a post at Salon yesterday entitled: “Stimulus Bill Not Dead Yet.”
The genesis of this sudden shift in perceptions is variable: the Daschle “scandal” has supposedly hurt or distracted Obama; conservatives have been all over the media with a relentless barrage of attacks on the supposed “pork” in the stimulus bill; there’s been public handwriting by Senate Democrats about their failure to nail down 60 votes; two self-styled “centrist” groups of senators from each party are kicking around major modifications to the bill that seem to get larger every minute.
Most of all, Republicans are excitedly high-fiving each other over the trends lines in Rasmussen polling on the stimulus package (see Nate Silver’s warning about the methodology!), showing things moving their way.
Perhaps it’s inevitable because of the quasi-mythical status of Team Obama as it took office, which created high expectations of instant political mastery, but still, I’ve never quite seen so much of a mood-shift based on, well, a mood-shift. Obama’s not perceived as doing well because people are saying that Obama’s not perceived as doing well. This is the sort of self-proliferating cycle of negative perceptions that can develop a ferocious energy, but can also dissipate rapidly in the fact of real-life events.
And that explains the president’s real challenge over the next few days: bringing the stimulus debate back to earth, instead of letting it be determined by who is perceived as doing a better job of spinning it.