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.

Paul Krugman raises the issue of accountability regarding Sanjay Gupta's appointment as surgeon general -- PLUS we have a Blair House update!

At least he's sexy enough to be surgeon general.

"Appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way."

-- Paul Krugman, on his blog yesterday (link below)

by Ken

I think we can say it's official now, that the Obama campaign so famous for being leakproof has metamorphosed into a transition that leaks like a sieve. It doesn't seem to be the transition itself that's initiating the leaks, but there's enough information out there to put the leakers now our primary source of information about the transition, and in control in a curious way, as with the recent case of the leak of the intended appointment of Leon Panetta to head the CIA, done in such a way as to make possible or even encourage Sen. Dianne Feinstein's public show of disapproval.

Now we have the leak of the apparently planned appointment of CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta to be surgeon general, with an assurance (we're told) of input into health-care policy-making. I would have thought there wouldn't be much controversy, since as a practicing neurosurgeon he's clearly medically qualified, and you would think his media presence and savvy would be a plus in terms of the surgeon general's role of bully puppeteer. It seems, though, that some people aren't so comfortable with the celebrity component of the appointment -- either that he's somehow too famous, or maybe that his celebrity seems to be more of a credential than his competence.

None of this seems to trouble the Washington Post's Howie Kurtz, who's in something like gush mode over the good doctor. But then, in the insular world of the Village at the heart of Washington, D.C., which is pretty much the whole world to our Howie, or at least all the world that matters, Dr. Gupta is A-OK. Why, isn't he one of People magazine's "sexiest men alive"?

In the tradition of balanced journalism, Howie does manage to find a dissenting voice, in this case a representative of the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, which is overseen by the surgeon general.

"I am unaware of any public health experience or qualifications he has to be the leader of the nation's public health service," said Gerard M. Farrell, executive director of the service's Commissioned Officers Association. "This would be akin to appointing the Army chief of staff from the city council of Hoboken," N.J.

But you know those workers -- never satisfied, always griping. Be honest now. Does anyone know what the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service does? Does anyone care?

Paul Krugman raised a different objection in this blog post:

The trouble with Sanjay Gupta

So apparently Obama plans to appoint CNN’s Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

Ah, accountability, or rather the lack of it -- a subject that seems to have become inescapable with the fading of the Bush regime and its wall-to-wall disasters. It's not a happy indication, this seeming confirmation that social acceptability will continue to be more important than getting your facts right. And maybe it matters that someone who couldn't get his facts right about Sicko is expecting a say in formulating health-care policy.


BUT WHAT IF THE OBAMAS ALL PROMISED TO STAY
IN THEIR ROOMS? (THERE ARE 35 BATHS, AFTER ALL)


Last night we had Margaret Carlson's update on the Blair House booking crisis, in which she revealed that in fact there were no conflicting events when the Bushes turned down the Obamas' request to move in on the 5th rather than the 15th of January. You'll recall that our "In the Loop" pal Al Kamen has been on the case as well, and he's turned up more activity than the previously disclosed overnight stay of former Australian PM John Howard:

119 Rooms, 70,000 Square Feet and One Lucky Australian

By Al Kamen
Washington Post, Wednesday, January 7, 2009

The veil is lifted. We now know who is booked at Blair House, kicking President-elect Barack Obama and his family to the waiting list and across Lafayette Square to the Hay-Adams Hotel.

The only overnight visitor at the presidential guest manse is none other than John Howard, a former Australian prime minister and leading member of President Bush's coalition of the willing in Iraq.

Howard and his entourage will be bunking at Blair House on Jan. 12, the night before he, former British prime minister Tony Blair and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe are to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush, said Sally McDonough, a spokeswoman for first lady Laura Bush. The three current and former heads of state are longtime political allies of the president's, and Blair and Howard were key partners in the Iraq war.

Blair and Uribe also were invited to stay at Blair House but declined Bush's invitation, said a second White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Blair, who traditionally stays at the British Embassy, and Uribe apparently found other accommodations, the source said.

There are other scheduled events at Blair House, but no other overnight visits between now and Jan. 15, when the Obama family is scheduled to move in, McDonough said.

Today, Laura Bush will hold a private reception honoring members of the administration's Global Cultural Initiative, 80 of whom are in the diplomatic corps, McDonough said. The reception will be hosted by Protocol Chief Nancy Brinker.

"This has been a long-planned celebratory event at the Blair House," McDonough said.

She added that there are several other planned parties at Blair House.

The incoming first family requested an early move-in at the 70,000-square-foot, 119-room mansion across the street from the White House so the children could settle in to start school this week at Sidwell Friends School. But the Obamas was told the residence had been booked, so they took a suite at the Hay-Adams.

At the time, the White House would not say which events were bumping the Obamas.

Maybe Howard might offfer his digs on Craigslist in exchange for the presidential-elect suite at the Hay?

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