there's no such thing as an original sin - Elvis Costello
There can be no doubt of this: by vouching for the sufficiency of a stimulus that he knew had a good chance of being too small to put America back to work, Obama left himself with no story to tell about the economy when the 'recovery summer' of 2010 was a bust, and no effective answer to GOP claims that the stimulus simply didn't work.
Since swing voters, such as they are, tend to vote on the economy, and in particular how the economy is affecting their personal prospects, 2010 wasn't going to be a great year for Democrats regardless. But one can't help but think that it might have muted the damage if there had been a two-year narrative of how the GOP forced the stimulus to be too small, and blocked a second stimulus when the first one was unambiguously falling short on getting Americans back to work.
So the question keeps coming up: could Obama have initially put a bigger stimulus - e.g. $1.2 trillion - on the table (even if he had to back down quickly in the face of widespread opposition) and still passed a stimulus not too different from the one we got? Or would it have endangered the prospects of getting anything remotely close to $800 billion?
Andrew Leonard, in a piece Sir Charles cited approvingly yesterday, said:
But who is really being naive here? Krugman's position is that Obama starts too far to the right and leaves himself little negotiation room -- that he reduces the politics of the possible. But you have to wonder whether Obama would have gotten any significant legislation accomplished if he had come out of the gate pushing for a much bigger stimulus, single-payer healthcare, and the nationalization of Citigroup.
Which scenario is more likely -- the current Republican party buckling to Obama's progressive vigor, or centrist Democrat senators fleeing for the hills, denying the White House 60 votes on any of its agenda items? I know where I'd lay my money down.
I've long been on the side of those who don't buy the story that the merest mention on Obama's part at the beginning of a $1.2 trillion stimulus at the beginning of the process would have caused the whole thing to fall apart. I'm still there.
And what's more, I certainly don't believe Obama and his political people thought that, at least not early in the process of trying to get the stimulus bill through Congress.
Hell, they were talking about getting 80 votes for this thing in the Senate, remember? They thought that, with the inclusion of $300B in tax cuts to make the GOP happy, it would pass practically by acclamation. They believed they would have a ton of extra votes for a too-small stimulus.
And given that that's how they thought, it's hard to believe that they thought that starting off with a higher number would cause the whole thing to fall apart.
First of all, I can't see centrist Dems 'fleeing for the hills' if the price tag had started off at $1.2 trillion. (I'd agree that the trifecta of a big-enough stimulus and nationalizing Citigroup and starting off with a push for Medicare for all would have had that effect.) They'd have pushed back at the size, certainly. But our economy was shedding jobs at a horrific rate at the end of 2008 - by January 2009, over 3.2 million jobs had been wiped out just since August. It really was a crisis, nobody knew how long or far the fall would be before we hit bottom, and even the most pain-in-the-neck centrist Dems weren't going to tell Obama to forget the whole thing just because his initial number was high enough to upset them.
Second, even when we get past the hopes of 80 votes, and it's crunch time with Snowe, Collins, and Specter - well, that was later: the proposal of and potentially rapid retreat from a $1.2 trillion stimulus would have been weeks earlier, but suppose he already knew it was going to come down to them.
He needed the votes of at least two of this trio, since there were only 58 Dem Senators at this point. What's missing from this debate is any evidence that two or more of these Senators would have refused to consider voting for a stimulus on the order of what we got, if Obama had even briefly said we needed $1.2 trillion.
At the time, the price of Collins' vote was the reduction of the stimulus from $900B to $800B, but it seemed to be no deeper than the desire to look fiscally responsible by taking it down a modest notch. It was hard to imagine at the time that she wouldn't have been equally satisfied if the cut had been from $1.2 trillion to $1.1 trillion.
And if there's anything to suggest that an opening shot of $1.2 trillion would have ended any chance of winning Snowe's or Specter's vote, I haven't seen it.
I just don't believe, and I see no reason to believe, that the political dynamic was that sensitive at the time to the merest mention of a larger number. The Dems had just won big in November, the economy was in the aforementioned free fall, and those that believed that the government was going to have to do something were going to try to do something.
The political dynamic eventually became that sensitive, particularly after the town-hall meetings over health care reform in the summer of 2009. But the situation in January 2009 was vastly different.
