In the midst of a angry post about Drew Westen’s Sunday New York Times op-ed excoriating Barack Obama’s failure to use the bully pulpit to school Americans on the necessity of Keynsian fiscal stimulus, Jon Chait offers a useful comment about the need for precision in recounting past political events. Westen contrasted Obama’s passivity in resisting deficit hawkery with FDR’s aggressive advocacy of fiscal stimulus. Chait notes that (1) FDR was luckier than Obama in taking office at a much later stage in the economic downturn that defined his election; and (2) Roosevelt took quite a while to embrace Keynsian pump-priming, and never succeed during his first term in convincing Americans that was the right course.
On this last point, Chait quotes none other than Paul Krugman, who unearthed Gallup polls showing that Americans favored a balanced budget and debt reduction by a 70-30 margin at the end of 1935, and still favored a balanced budget by a 65-28 margin in November of 1936, just as they were re-electing FDR by a historic landslide.
None of this data suggests that Obama’s fiscal policies have been right, but it does undermine the assumption that the president of the United States can easily act as Economics-Professor-In-Chief, brushing away simplistic “family-budget” analogies of what a nation should do in a recession or depression with big doses of Keynes. Progressives in general have failed over a long period of time to promote a decent level of public understanding about what to do in a recession, and however much Obama has contributed to that failure, he’s hardly alone.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.