econtalk

100 Days and counting: Is Obama making things better or worse?

I recently heard someone say that the Obama Administration has deliberately made the economic situation worse so that it would increase the chance to get his agenda accepted in Congress and the public at large. This was mentioned in the context of some new announcement about GM and maybe firing of the GM CEO, but it could have been raised in connection with a number of different actions or announcements recently.

It is amazing how two intelligent and sensible people (like us?) can hear the same news or the same announcement and take away a completely different interpretation or impression. So I may have a different interpretation of events then you do, but I do reject the view of some that the Obama Administration is deliberately making things worse to advance their agenda. When people express such a view, which you may hear much more than I do, I would challenge them to think of why a rational human being would believe that increasing the number or the intensity of economic or other problems would be politically advantageous. It is a different thing to believe they made mistakes in judgment or undertake bad policies, but that they would willfully add to the enormous problems that already exist in the economy is just makes no sense—it’s nonsense.

It would be like saying that those promoting the Iraqi war allowed the situation to get really bad just so they could get more support for the war or send more troops. In my mind the conduct of the war was just incompetence not malfeasance. I could, however, believe that Cheney and company deliberately made us believe that the Iraqi threat was much larger than it was just to gain support for going to war in the first place. Maybe some of them really believed all that and maybe Bush himself was fooled by others, but I feel that at the very least, Bush failed to give sufficient attention to the cooler heads around him like Powell who was far less eager to go to war. Note that it took Bush about six years to figure out that Cheney was not the great source of wisdom he had thought, and began paying more attention to other voices.

Anyway, back to Obama and economics, I may not agree with all the economic decisions that are being made, but I do trust that they are truly trying to make things better not worse. I also prefer Obama’s decision making style, which takes consideration of wide ranging views and is more pragmatic than ideological. Note the balance in the terror memos, which let out the memos (mostly confirming what people already knew) but also protected those who carried out the authorized torture tactics. Note also the ruling by Justice that the Justice Department prosecutors who tried Sen. Stevens were unlawful so charges against Stevens were dropped.

I pay attention to Paul Krugman, who has been very critical of Obama’s economic policies, but don’t feel I understand the issues well enough to say he is always right and others wrong. In fact, conditions are such that it seems safer to try a range of remedies and hope that some will work, whereupon you do more of that and less of the ones that don’t.

In foreign relations I also prefer the talking approach and looking for common interests with other countries as opposed to the “my way or the highway” of the Bush administration. As Jim Baker says, “talking to the enemy is not appeasement”. We need to employ all kinds of power, economic, diplomatic, and moral, not just the military kind.

In general, what it comes down to is that I much prefer the Obama approach and the expertise he has assembled, and especially the idea that we have to deal with problems not piece by piece but in consideration of how each effects the other,- both in domestic economy and foreign affairs issues.

posted by econtalk @ 6:47 PM