There were two notable improvements in Barack Obama’s press conference last night compared with his first presser several weeks ago.
First, by switching from two teleprompters located on the sides of the podium to one directly in front of him, Obama made much better eye contact with the television audience. Gone was the “looking right then left” head-turning that prevented him from looking directly into the camera. Just compare the YouTube video of his opening statements last night with his presser several weeks ago. It’s subtle, but it matters.
Second, Obama laid out the framework for a more coherent “common sense” narrative about his budget and future deficits – one that working people and small business owners may find more vivid.
Essentially, with his forceful repetition of the twin concepts of “investment” and “growth” to explain his budget Obama suggested an analogy between his economic strategy and the strategy of a typical small businessperson starting a new project. Let’s make the analogy explicit.

Two people decide to open restaurants. The first – more concerned about keeping his borrowing from the bank to an absolute minimum than anything else – borrows only $100,000, and tries to get by using paper plates, rickety furniture, the fewest possible waiters and the cheapest available chefs. As a result, the restaurant gets very few customers and eventually closes because the low revenues are not sufficient to pay even the relatively small monthly debt.
The second businessperson borrows twice as much, invests in decent quality tableware and furniture, more waiters and more highly trained cooks. As a result of these investments, the business attracts more customers and generates enough revenue to not only pay the larger monthly debt but also to turn a healthy profit.

This notion — that smart investments generate growth and allow one to pay even large monthly debts out of the even larger profits – is familiar and compelling to millions of Americans who own and manage small businesses. By emphatically repeating that his main priorities – health care, education, energy independence etc. – are all represent “good investments” that will lower costs and increase economic growth in the future, Obama explicitly invoked this mental model several times during his remarks.
This way of explaining Obama’s economic strategy makes the dry statistics of budgets and deficits something that average Americans can visualize in terms of “common sense.” Republicans can respond by arguing that Obama’s priorities are actually lousy investments that just waste money, but that’s a much more uphill argument than simply being able to attack the budget as just “spending” money and “increasing future debt.” Bobby Jindal’s ham-handed attempt to ridicule spending on volcano monitoring – which literally blew up in his (or more precisely Sarah Palin’s) face — illustrates the point quite nicely.

If you are really interested in debates over out-year budget deficits, last night’s presidential press conference was a gas from beginning to end, with reporters putting on their green eyeshades and clucking over ten-year debt and deficit forecasts, and Obama answering with polite variations on the theme: “You don’t get it.”
But in the eyes of the news media itself, the big news probably wasn’t how the president answered questions, but who got to ask them. Here’s how Michael Calderone of Politico summed it up:

[I]n quite a departure from the first presser — and White House protocol — Obama skipped over the nation’s top newspapers. Indeed, there were no questions from the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or USA Today. That might not sit well with the already insecure newspaper industry.
In exchange, Obama opened things up to a wider variety of outlets, including Spanish-language television, a military news outlet, and black-oriented media. It’s another example of the White House going over the typical Washington press corps “filter.”

Calderone didn’t specifically mention the joy that probably broke out at Politico itself when its own reporter, Mike Allen, was called on by the president, while the Washington Post, where many Politico staffers used to work, didn’t get the Big Nod for prime-time TV exposure.
That makes two-for-two for defiance of ancient press protocol canons in Obama’s prime-time presidential press conferences. In the first one last month, the president created a buzz by calling on Sam Stein of Huffington Post. Oh my God, you could almost hear reporters think, calling on a blogger at a presidential press conference!
In taking this approach, it’s not as though Obama is trying to dodge tough questions or hostile reporters. Fox and the Washington Times were among the organizations whose reporters were selected for a question last night. Moreoever, the president routinely allowed follow-up questions, which most politicians just as routinely refuse to do, since they (a) reduce the amount of time available to spread the press-love around, and (b) are generally designed to expose evasions of initial questions.
I really don’t think there’s any overt strategy of exclusion or inclusion going on in Obama’s press conferences, to this point. But it is clear he and his staff aren’t particularly interested in observing traditions of press entitlement that lost whatever rationale they ever had many years ago. I’m sure some Washington observers were annoyed that time was “wasted” in questions from “ethnic media” like Univision and Ebony. But the questions–about the Mexican “border war” and about homelessness–were actually a refreshing break from the relentless effort to provoke a presidential gaffe on the budget or AIG.
In general, Team Obama’s approach to media relations is more a reflection than a cause of social, technological and economic changes in media usage and the consequent reportorial pecking order. But it’s interesting to see these changes play out in one of the hoariest, most tradition-laden venues this side of the British House of Lords, the presidential press conference.

For anyone focused on the climate change challenge, or for that matter, the long-overdue task of transforming America’s energy sector, the last few days have been painful, as signals emerge from Washington that congressional action this year on carbon limits–the hinge on which all other climate change efforts depends–is unlikely.
This bad news first arose from a report by ABC’s George Stephanopolis last week that the Obama administration had decided tentatively to move (or at least threaten to move) health care reform, but not its signature carbon cap-and-trade proposal, via the budget reconciliation route. The decision itself was likely forced when eight Senate Democrats signed onto a Republican letter to the Budget Committee opposing the inclusion of cap-and-trade in any budget reconciliation package.
As the perpetual gridlock over earlier cap-and-trade bills in Congress would indicate, a proposal without the protection of a reconciliation package–which cannot be filibustered–is unlikely to survive the Senate without being fatally watered down.
Moreover, as TDS Co-Editor Bill Galston explains at TNR today, there are other adverse developments that make action on cap-and-trade this year very problematic. For one thing, polls are showing new strength for the old Republican talking point that we can’t afford environmental progress in a bad economy. And for another, regional factionalism on energy policy hasn’t gone away, as evidenced by the above-mentioned senatorial letter to the Budget Committee: of the eight Democrats signing on, seven are from energy-producing states, and the eighth is from auto-producing Michigan.
But as Galston also points out, the consequences of inaction this year are more concrete and immediate than another delay in dealing with the ever-ticking clock of climate change. For one thing, cap-and-trade is a revenue raiser, and if it’s not included in the budget package, the administration will have to find some other way to pay for the president’s politically crucial Make Work Pay tax credit, his major tax cut for middle-class families. And for another, the long-awaited resumption of international climate change negotiations, which the Bush administration worked so hard to torpedo, is due to occur in December in Copenhagen, and it would be very helpful if the United States showed up with a policy accomplishment in hand.
There remains, of course, a sort of “nuclear option” for enacting carbon limits: regulatory action by EPA under the aegis of the Clean Air Act, a path made available by a 2007 Supreme Court decision. As Kate Sheppard of Gristmill reported yesterday, EPA has just taken an important procedural step–a finding that climate change endangers the public welfare–in that direction. It’s more likely, suggests Sheppard, that the administration will use that option as leverage to force Congress to deal with the subject itself. But it may have to wait until next year.

Peter Nicholas and Peter Wallsten are on to something in their L.A.Times article “On Economic Matters, Obama Lacks a Secretary of Selling It.”:

Aside from President Obama, the administration has yet to find a commanding figure who can carry economic policy messages and inspire confidence in White House prescriptions…In assembling his economic team, the President gave first priority to technical skill and intellectual achievement. So far, none of his senior advisors has shown the extra ability to inspire as well — both on Wall Street and Main Street…Because the programs are complex, costly and politically unpopular, the dearth of administration officials who can dominate the stage is becoming a serious handicap.

Economists can be eloquent fellows talking to each other and to other policy wonks. However,

“The ability to communicate with average people was not what these people were chosen for,” said Alice M. Rivlin, budget director under President Clinton. “They were chosen for their understanding of the problem and their ability to think creatively about it and to work out solutions to what is admittedly a very complex issue.”…Selling the president’s economic plans “clearly has not been their forte,” she said

Certainly no one has identified any nascent media stars on Obama’s economic team. But has there ever been a really impressive economic policy salesman or woman, as far as the average voter is concerned ? There’s a reason they call Economics “the dismal science.” If you want to clear out a party quickly, just start talking loudly about the Laffer curve or the velocity of M1.
It could be argued that President Reagan and Newt Gingrich were effective economic policy pitchmen. But what they were really selling was simple: deregulation and tax and federal budget cuts — less economic policy. Their pitch was well-timed, if ill-considered and simplistic. Never mind that they ended up tripling the federal deficit.
Like Obama, FDR was his own economic pitchman and by all accounts, he worked the press quite effectively. But it was a simpler time then, and radio, a media industry now dominated by right-wing gasbags, was the make or break p.r. tool. Pitching economic policy to voters is now more about television than any other media, with the influence of the internet rising just as print media begins to fade into history. Moreover, FDR was really selling himself. He was able to convey a bold persona and a sense that he knew what he was doing.
It is unclear whether Obama, his extraordinary speechmaking skills notwithstanding, can sell himself as effectively over time in our more cynical era. Communications tools are more complex, and that can be a good thing for a media-savvy president (see our staff post below). He has gotten high marks from economists for his media advocacy of economic policy reforms, according to Wallsten and Nicholas. But there is a fear among his staff of over-exposure, and worse, burnout. Tonight he will face the media in his second news conference, and hopefully will do as well as in his first press conference. Generally, however, he should play to his strength — speechifying.
Bottom line is a great many people are still bewildered or bored by economic policy discussions, despite the loud arguments about economic policy taking place in living rooms, bars and at water coolers across the country. It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest salesman/woman in the world fronting your agenda. Bailouts for failed banks and auto companies, along with subsidies for imprudent homeowners are a tough sell, no matter how well-justified by the cold hard facts. Ditto for tax hikes and reassuring voters that their retirement assets will one day return from the market’s Bermuda Triangle.
President Obama’s hole card is that voters well-understand that he has inherited a horrible mess not of his making, and most get it that there is no quick fix. He has to be careful, though, not to parrot this meme so much that it starts to sound like whining. Leave that thankless task to his economic team.

Jonathan Martin of Politico offers a good discussion today of President Obama’s media strategy, and specifically his and his staff’s efforts to bypass the White House Press Corps and communicate directly with particular constituencies and with people who derive news and views from nontraditional sources.
“Bypassing the filters,” of course, was a hallmark of Obama’s presidential campaign, which often found ways to bypass would-be gatekeepers of information and opinion, from the mainstream media to bloggers to interest-group chieftains.
But now that he’s in power, Obama’s approach to media has become much more comprehensive:

Unlike some of his predecessors, however, Obama and his aides tend not to boast about their media strategy or publicly exalt in how they are confronting or marginalizing the traditional news media.
To the contrary, Obama has continued to engage aggressively with the establishment outlets. The New York Times recently had an interview, and CBS News’ “60 Minutes” has conducted two long interviews with Obama since Election Day.
These sessions reflect Obama’s belief, according to aides, that in a fragmented media universe, presidents must communicate nearly constantly across an array of platforms, both traditional and new.
“You’ve got lots of people that aren’t cable junkies or news junkies,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, explaining the thinking behind the tailored media strategy. “This gives us the opportunity to reach a little bit different of a segment.”
Another top aide used a sports analogy for the comprehensive strategy: “Flood the zone.”

As recent developments have shown, Obama needs all the help he can get in communicating his message and agenda to a worried and skeptical America.

I will beg regular readers to forgive my redundancy on this subject. But so long as Republicans continue to shriek about the possible use of budget reconciliation procedures for health care and/or climate change legislation as though this represented some sort of revolutionary new technique for sneaking legislation through Congress, I will ocassionally issue reminders that reconciliation in its current form was largely the creation of the sainted Ronald Reagan.
You wouldn’t know that from watching an exchange between Sean Hannity and Mike Huckabee on Fox late last week, wherein the duo acted like they’d never heard of reconciliation until it was spawned by the devilish socialists of the Obama administration:

HANNITY: [T]he Congress now along with the White House is looking now to use a parliamentary procedure called reconciliation as a means of passing their health-care reform, their tax increases, their extreme cap and trade, their energy policies. Now, that would mean that they pass all of these things without any Republicans even having an opportunity to vote. How dangerous do you think that is?
HUCKABEE: It’s horribly dangerous because it really does bypass the entire system of the American government, where we’re supposed to have an honest debate.

Aside from the fact that the “Republicans can’t vote” assertion is nonsense (at most reconciliation means that Republicans can’t filibuster), Hannity and Huckabee surely know that reconciliation as we know it–as a vehicle for large packages of legislation that don’t simply alter funding levels–was largely invented by Reagan OMB director David Stockman as the means of enacting Ronald Reagan’s entire agenda in 1981.
In the original Congressional Budget Act of 1974, “reconciliation” was an enforcement measure attached to the end of the budget process as a means of forcing rebellious authorizing or appropriations committees to remain within the bounds of the congressional budget resolution. In 1980, however, the procedure was changed allowing “reconciliation instructions” to be included at the front end of the process, to avoid time delays and to anticipate disputes. Only in 1981 did this “front-end reconciliation” become something very different: a fast-track measure to enact very specific changes in in a vast array of federal laws that happened to accomplish budget resolution revenue and spending targets. It was a giant tail wagging the dog of budget levels.
The audacious use of reconciliation by the Reagan administration in 1981 didn’t end there, however. Once the reconciliation bill emerged from the committee system and came to the House floor for a vote, the administration’s congressional allies, unhappy with some of the details, offered a comprehensive floor substitute, labeled Gramm-Latta II, that essentially enacted a couple of years’ worth of legislation in one bill that virtually nobody had read. (The bill as enacted included lunch orders and lobbyists’ phone numbers scribbled by staffers in the margins of the text). And hardly any significant federal program avoided a major re-write of its authorizing langage in ways that reshaped the federal government and its relationship with state and localities, businesses, and individuals in a sweeping array of areas.
While nothing will ever match the breath-taking chutzpah of Gramm-Latta II, short of an actual dictatorship (the so-called Byrd Rule did subsequently place some limits on fast-track enactment of legislation that has little or nothing to do with spending or revenue levels), reconciliation has been regularly used to package and enact major legislation in the ensuing years. Examples included the first Clinton budget package of 1993, the first Gingrich budget package (twice vetoed by Clinton until a final compromise was worked out) in 1995, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, and the Bush tax cuts of 2001, among others. All of these bills included major policy changes that were remote from the task of simply laying out a federal budget or changing spending or revenue levels.
It may ultimately turn out that the Obama administration and congressional Democrats will decide to move some parts of the president’s agenda, including health care and/or climate change legislation, outside the reconciliation process, to make changes that might run afoul of the Byrd Rule or to encourage some bipartisan support. But those whose alpha and omega in politics and policy is Ronald Reagan really do need to acknowledge that their hero created this particular tool for majority rule in Congress.

After a slow rollout over the last few days, the administration’s bank rescue plan has been released, to very mixed reviews. And this time, skepticism if not hostility has spread pretty deeply into the progressive ranks.
Brad DeLong offers a pretty clear explanation, and a relatively positive take. Paul Krugman expresses “despair,” and says it’s just another rehash of the Paulson Plan.
(Meanwhile, international markets responded positively to advance reports over the weekend, and stocks–particularly for banks–rose sharply on Wall Street this morning.)
There’s an important anomaly to note in the freetings over progressives over this plan. Most of those reacting negatively favor a “temporary takeover” or “nationalization” of financial institutions. But even in this camp, there’s a widespread assumption that a failure of the current plan will drive Congress in the opposite direction, towards a neo-Hooverian obsession with deficit reduction and suspension of any further public investments. Since Republicans are already pretty much down with the Herbert Hoover approach, that means a significant faction of congressional Democrats would move not towards a more aggressive approach to freeing up credit, but towards the Republicans.
Indeed, some nationalization proponents seem to think the public will move that way too, out of anger towards never-ending public subsidies of banks and other failed enterprises. In other words, one highly influential progressive point of view is that the administration must move sharply “left” or its policies will likely produce a sharp move to the “right” in Congress and around the country–led by enough congressional Democrats to thwart the administration’s designs.
If nothing else, it seems to be clear that Democrats as a whole control their own destiny. The question is which Democrats will be in a position to lead one way or another once the dust has settled.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Sheryl Jean of the Dallas-Morning News ‘Economy Watch Blog’ reports that the National Small Business Association has launched a new website, “Health Reform Today.”
In his Alternet article, “Health Care Reform in Critical Condition,” Roy Ulrich discusses whether it is still true, as former HEW Secretary Joseph Califano said that “real health care reform in this country could not become a reality until we accomplished the goal of enacting campaign finance reform at the national level.”
Former Senator Tom Daschle has a WaPo op-ed urging Americans not to get distracted by conservative fear-mongering about the ‘who’ of health care reform, and instead keep focused on the ‘what’ and the imperative of making reform a reality.
Also at WaPo, Karen Pallarito takes a look at the Obama Administration evolving health care reform proposals in light of a recent national opinion survey by Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health (toplines here).
Salon.com columnist Joe Conason’s “The questions our health care debate ignores” puts America’s health care system in global perspective in terms of universal coverage and cost.
Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, takes an interesting look at current reform options facing Obama and the Democrats in “An Election, a Budget, and Two Summits = A Bold Obama Strategy for Health Care Change.”
On March 3rd, I suggested that the failures of health care system are as much if not more of a real threat to national security in terms of protecting the lives of Americans than terrorism. Imagine, for example, the outrage if the death toll for our troops was 60 per day in Iraq or Afghanistan, because 60 per day or about 22 thousand Americans per year die from “the lack of health insurance,” according to the Institute of Medicine.
The Atlantic‘s Marc Armbinder reports that The Obama Administration will pursue health care reform through the 2010 budget resolutions, if they can’t forge a bipartisan consensus. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com riffs on Armbinder’s article, noting the additional leverage Dems get in the struggle for health care reform as recession deepens and arguing that “it’s a fight where the White House ought to be favored.” Ezra Klein also has a post up today at The American Prospect on the legislative strategy of health reform via the budget process.
Ezra Klein also has an In These Times interview of Steffie Woolhandler, co-director of Physicians for a National Health Program, and Richard Kirsch, the national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now (HCAN) on the topic, “Which Way to Universal Healthcare?.”
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted 3/12-15 found that nearly three out of four adults are “happy with their overall health care coverage,”but more than three out of four respondents are “dissatisfied with the total cost of health care in this country” and only 29 percent say they are “very confident” they could pay their bills in the event of a major medical emergency.
Single-payer advocates will find americanheathcarerreform.org a bountiful source of links to insightful articles on the topic.

This week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last issue. Last month, the Rocky Mountain News ceased to exist. Across the country, newspapers and magazines are cutting staff, reducing coverage, and scaling back.
Journalists feel like they’re living in a crisis, and rightly so. A respected profession that has been supported by a stable, profitable business model for more than a hundred years is about to be upended.
But it’s the business model which has been given the death sentence — not the profession. The end of print is not the end of journalism.
In a brilliant essay published online this week, Clay Shirky writes:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

The future offers plenty of alternatives — we just don’t know what they are yet.
The newspaper business is dominated by the fact that owning and operating a printing press is an enormously expensive endeavor. Those production costs are so high that newspapers rely on a combination of advertising and paid subscription to turn a profit.
The Internet poses an incredible threat to print journalism because it reduces production costs to nothing. That in turn provides competition for both advertiser dollars and story coverage.
Classified advertising — which used to be the lifeblood of newspapers all over the country — has been replaced by Craigslist. Print journalists are so frequently scooped by online competitors that many newsrooms have shifted their production schedules to meet the demands of the Internet (which means publishing stories online immediately), and it seems like every beat writer in America has her own blog and Twitter feed.
Perhaps no fact better demonstrates the absurdity of print production than this: The New York Times could buy each of its subscribers a new Amazon Kindle — the popular e-book reader which offers Times content — for half the amount of money that it costs to print and deliver its newspaper each year.

Read more…

Today’s Wall Street Journal features a novel conservative argument about comparisons between Barack Obama and FDR. The standard fare is that everybody knows FDR failed to do much about the Great Depression, which was actually ended by World War II (never mind the contradiction between claims that stimulating demand through government spending always fail–except when that stimulus is via the Department of Defense!).
But George Bittlingmayer and Thomas W. Hazlitt, two conservative academics, have taken a different tack: FDR’s 100 Days policy blitz, which focused on a banking crisis, was actually “conservative,” and depended in no small part on rhetorical attacks on government spending that assuaged the concerns of bankers and other investors.
In making this case, Bittlingmayer and Hazlitt don’t much try to compare the nature of the 1933 banking crisis and today’s, and also don’t comment at all on how or why FDR departed from his wise conservative course in subsequent months and years. They do sneak into the argument the assumption that Obama’s (and, as anyone who reads polls can tell you, the public’s) concerns about the behavior of corporate executives seeking public subventions are disastrously undermining investor confidence:

Limiting corporate jets and CEO salaries may play well to the crowd. But every rational shareholder knows that jets make sense if (and only if) they help increase profits, and that arbitrary pay limits don’t protect company assets or owners. Instead, failed managers need to be replaced, at competitive wages, by superior ones. New shareholder protections that made that easier would attract bipartisan support and be cheered by investors.

I guess that these gents think investors are “going Galt” in their own small way out of disgust at public anger over their “rational” perks, and depressing the markets. By suggesting that current psychology, not past policies and events, are responsible for the current crisis, this is a clever means of shifting blame from Bush and the GOP to Obama and Democrats, which is an obvious objective in virtually all conservative agitprop these days.
But it’s interesting the extent to which the profs rely for their argument almost exclusively on the accounts of the 100 days by Raymond Moley, the brain-truster who left the Roosevelt administration midway through 1933, and then devoted much of the rest of his long career to New Deal-bashing, contemporary and revisionist. It’s a bit like citing Dick Morris as the definitive chronicler of the Clinton administration. Like Morris, Moley was indeed briefly a shaker and mover in a presidential administration. But like Morris, he chose to go into opposition, and his bitterly expressed interpretation of the deeds and thoughts of his one-time chief have to be taken with a shaker of salt.