Democrats Indicate A Pulse-- Some Will Not Be Rubber Stamps For Obama When He Leans Too Far Towards Bad Republican Ideas

Obama and Conrad

With extreme right wing loons demanding that "their" congressional delegates adopt their own 100% obstruct-obstruct-obstruct posture towards Obama, Limbaugh and other Republican propaganda agents are already claiming the impending Bush-GOP Depression is Obama's fault-- just as they always claimed that FDR caused the Great Depression. The latest from the Bush Economic Miracle: a 7.2% unemployment rate (highest in 16 years), spiraling out of control as the effects of Republican economic policies settle in. Another 524,000 jobs were lost in December, a number likely to be revised to over 600,000 in a few weeks. Total job losses for 2008 is 2.6 million. That's conservative economic and financial policy in action.

Now today's Obamacrats are apparently going to try and Hooverize President Bush in an effort to shield themselves from the potential political fallout of a prolonged recession. It will take years to fix the American economy, Obama says, and years of trillion-dollar budget deficits to do it. And everyday it seems that Team Obama tries to lower economic expectations, such as bearishly predicting that unemployment would hit double-digits.

The not-so-subtle message in the middle of all these pessimistic prognostications: When ya'll go to vote in 2010 and 2012 and a) unemployment is still as high as it's been in decades, b) income growth is sluggish at best, c) the budget deficit is running at a trillion bucks a year, and d) stock prices remain stubbornly low-- hey, don't blame us, you can't rebuild Rome in a day or even in a first term. Remember, Bush really left us a mess.

Sounds reasonable, right? Not to the dogmatic right. They're already brainwashing the easily brainwashed and brain-dead who make up what's left of the Republican Party base. Crackpot wingnut James Pethokoukis asks "how can Obama avoid taking responsibility when he will be so actively meddling in the economy? It will be his decision to forego deep and permanent new tax cuts, his decision to not extend the Bush tax cuts, his decision on how to spend the remaining $350 billion in TARP money, his decision to quasi-nationalize healthcare, his decision to push a cap-and-trade carbon emission program and his decision to spend hundreds of billions on a 'green' industrial policy. It might even be his decision to try and reunionize the American laborforce. Obama will 'own' the battered economy, perhaps almost literally, given Uncle Sam's bailout binge."

The Republican Party has proven, once again, what their sick, selfish ideology does when given a free rein. Eight years of Bush and even more years of GOP domination of Congress has driven the country to the brink of disaster. As Ken pointed out so eloquently yesterday, it's time for the grownups to take over and for wingnut obstructionists to shut the hell up.

I fear that Obama's obsession with compromise is the wrong way to proceed. In the name of some kind of unattainable bipartisan consensus he is rolling over of virtually everything that comes up. Fortunately we are starting to hear rumblings from the committed defenders of working families that Obama show some backbone in dealing with the Republican obstructionists. Today, for example, Speaker Pelosi urged him to repeal Bush's economy-crippling tax cuts for the wealthy.

Pelosi supports Obama's push to include $300 billion in middle-class tax relief but she has long been a critic of Bush's cuts for families making over $250,000 a year.

Obama said he would get rid of the cuts during his campaign, but has softened his stance in recently weeks, saying the dire state of the economy could force him to abandon the idea of quickly repealing them, for fear of worsening the contraction.

Earlier on Thursday, the speaker told reporters the Bush cuts were "the biggest contributor to the budget deficit" and said the threshhold for a prospective House repeal would be in the "$250,000 to $300,000 [family income] range."

And on the Senate side, it looks like populist champion Kent Conrad is also going to hold Obama's feet to the fire when he leans over too far in placating the far right idiots who authored the nation's financial catastrophe. "[S]enators emerging from a private meeting of the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday said that tax portion of Obama's stimulus plan is unworkable. They were especially critical of a proposed $3,000 tax credit for companies that hire or retrain workers. Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota described it as 'misdirected.'" Conrad is correct in pointing out that all these tax cuts for businesses will do more harm than good for the economy.

"I don’t think it works,” said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), a member of the Finance panel and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “I don’t think it will give much lift to the economy.

“If someone offers you several thousands of dollars in tax credits when your product is not selling, are you going to hire someone?” Conrad asked rhetorically.

Obama surprised his colleague earlier this week by floating the idea of combining several hundred billion dollars' worth of tax cuts with the economic stimulus.

Conrad said economists learned from the Great Depression that marginal incentives are not effective “when the economy is falling away from you.”

“People use it to pay debt or to save — that’s human nature,” he said.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), another member of Finance, voiced skepticism.

“I’m not that excited about it,” Kerry said. “The creation of a tax credit for hiring isn’t going to make up for the lack of goods being sold."

Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), another Democrat on the Finance panel, which has primary jurisdiction over the stimulus package, said that infrastructure spending is more important.

“In tough times, people don’t respond that well to marginal changes,” Wyden said.

Conrad, Kerry and Wyden have had far more progressive voting records in the Senate than Obama and have acted as defenders of working families much more frequently. And on another Obama mistake-- his desire to appoint celebrity talking head Sanjay Gupta Surgeon General-- Rep. John Conyers is working to whip up some Democratic opposition to this ridiculous choice. I'm relieved that Democrats don't plan to take on a rubber stamp posture the way Republican members of Congress did with Bush.


UPDATE: OH, GOOD-- OTHERS NOTICED AS WELL

In this morning's NY Times Peter Baker and David Herszenhorn point out that Democrats aren't happy that Obama's bold talk is amounting to some rehashed and discredited Republican nostrums for economic recovery, namely more tax cuts and not enough job creation and infrastructure building. Obama is going to have to learn-- and learn fast-- that playing footsie with Republicans, as though they were men of good will, will only wreck his plans to rescue America from the mess they have made.

“There is only one thing we have got to do in the stimulus, and that is how can we create jobs,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, as he left the meeting. “I am a little concerned by the way that Mr. Summers and others are going at this in that, to me, it still looks like a little more of this trickle-down, if we just put it in at the top, it’s going to trickle down. A number of people in there said, ‘Look, we have got to have programs that actually create jobs and put people to work.’ ”

Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, said lawmakers and the incoming administration had differences over how to focus the huge federal spending in a recovery bill. “Investment, investment, investment has got to be the central focus: energy, roads, bridges, waterways, housing,” he said. “Job creation is Job One.”

Mr. Conrad, who described the meeting as extremely positive, said Mr. Summers ended it by telling the senators, “Message received, loud and clear.”

OK... now let's see what they do with it. Like John Judis I'm worried that Team Obama's actions may not be nearly as bold as candidate Obama's promises. And there is only one way to deal with reactionaries: a steamroller.