[W]e’re in… the aftermath of a giant financial crisis, which typically leads to a prolonged period of economic weakness -- and this time isn’t different. A bolder economic policy early this year might have led to a turnaround, but what we actually got were half-measures. As a result, unemployment is likely to stay near its current level for a year or more… [E]conomic half-measures have landed the Obama administration in a trap: [T]he political establishment now sees stimulus as... discredited by events…. deficit scolds have come back into their own, decrying any policy that actually involves spending money.
The result, then, will be high unemployment leading into the 2010 elections, and corresponding Democratic losses. These losses will be worse because Obama, by pursuing a uniformly pro-banker policy without even a gesture to popular anger over the bailouts, has ceded populist energy to the right and demoralized the movement that brought him to power… [M]idterms probably won’t give Republicans the majority in the House. But the losses will be big enough to deny Obama a working majority for any major initiatives in the rest of his first term. (My guess is that he’ll be reelected thanks to the true awfulness of the Republican nominee)…
All the wise heads will tell us that 8 or 9 percent unemployment -- maybe even 10 percent -- is the “new normal”, and that only irresponsible people want to do anything about the situation…. [T]o have any hope of breaking out of this trap, Obama and company… have to propose new initiatives that might not pass, and be prepared to run against the do-nothing Republicans if the initiatives fail… [N]ow… the administration strategy is to insist that only a few minor course corrections are needed, and to wait for the jobs to start coming in. Maybe they’ll get lucky. But hope is not a plan…. Progressives have to keep the pressure on. The time for trusting the administration to do what’s necessary is past -- all indications are that it won’t, not on its own…
I do think that Obama was counting on a bump due to healthcare reform and that this is not likely to materialize because we're settling for a foot in the door that is important for long-term reform but nothing to write home about here and now.
Krugman's frustration that Obama "has ceded populist energy to the right and demoralized the movement that brought him to power" is the key contention here, and seems to be in line with the emerging Netroots consensus on the matter. I concede the force of the critique, but I do wonder about it.
Is it really too late for this gesture to righteous populist anger against corporatists to occur? Think what a difference a splashy pageant of perp walks can make. Is it really true that the upcoming pivot to jobs and infrastructure investment signaled by the administration need be compromised into irrelevance by serially discredited deficit hawks? Is it wrong to assume the frustration of higher-information progressives is exactly the same thing as a demoralization of the whole movement that brought Obama to power, and that demoralization among activists really will translate into stay-at-home Democrats when presumably their high-information status includes a grasp of what it means for Democrats to lose governing majorities? Do we really know enough about the first time voters who were energized by Obama's candidacy to know whether he can in fact remobilize them by a direct appeal?
The Obama machine has acquired a distressing tone-deafness over the course of this year, but perhaps returned to the environment of explicit campaigning might they regain their sea legs? Are we misreading the presumed activation of Republican "populism" -- focusing on a crazytown base that is certainly more enthusiastic about rebelling against an African-American President than they were about cheering for a McCain for whom they had never felt more than ambivalence in the first place -- when Republican obstructionism is yielding devastating sound-bites for campaign season, when Republican ID remains at record lows, when Republican fundraising remains lower than the Democrats's, when Republicans seem to be making a devil's bargain, a trade-off between noisemaking purchased at the cost of self-marginalization, that might make a certain Hail Mary Pass kind of sense for a mid-term base election but seems batshit crazy for longer-term propspects?
Krugman seems to assume that Obama will not take his (and many others's) correct advice about risking proposals equal to our dire circumstances and then actually going after Republican obstructionism if these proposals fail. Perhaps he doubts this because of Obama's much derided "bipartisaniship fetish," but I have always regarded these bipartisan noises as smiling offerings of a hangman's noose to Republicans who become collaborators in progressive outcomes their anti-governmental stance cannot abide if they take him up on it and are exposed as a neoconfederate rump if they refuse.
I'll admit I remain a qualified holdout believing in the possibility of bucking the historical trend of holding the line at mid-terms and not losing governing majorities, even given the economic horror show, especially if we can force a jobs bill through or put the blame on its failure squarely of Republican obstructionists. Even Krugman in this pessimistic (but realistic) missive is not expecting Republican gains to lose Democrats their governing majority in the House.
I am rather flabbergasted by the mixed messaging coming out of the White House after the Afghanistan speech (which I think was a terrible mistake and actually an evil deed, but I must say I didn't expect the error to be compounded so quickly by the weird amateur hour messaging that has followed it, adding self-inflicted injury to insult), and I despair like every other sensible person every single day the administration stubbornly clings to corporatist criminals like Summers who remain so smugly complacent and plutocratic even in the midst of the toxic ruins of their palpably failed neoliberal assumptions.
I agree that "progressives have to keep pressure on," and I understand what Krugman is warning against when he insists that "the time for trusting is past," but I still think that "making him do it" continues to mean that progressives must remain as participants in the process (since relinquishing the field in disgust or despair or self-righteousness is also ceding the position from which pressure can be felt at all), that we cannot return to our too-comfortable default position as a blanket opposition -- arising out of the Netroots's incubation period in the epoch of the Killer Clowns -- but remain sympathetic responsible collaborators in a failing mess of half-measures, broken promises, disgusting sausage-making nudging in the direction of best possible outcomes.
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