Freezing
Earlier this morning, I tweeted, “If the arguments in the coming years are between spending freezes and spending cuts, then we’ve already won.”
I’m getting a lot of pushback on it, with quite a few folks pointing to all the exceptions in Obama’s spending freeze.
My argument is not “hooray Obama” and in fact it doesn’t have much to do with Obama’s specific proposal. My argument is that we’ve gotten a man who campaigned on expanding government to concede that his vision is not affordable. This is an enormous opportunity for those who want to see a smaller, more focused government. …
Mary Katharine Ham is of a similar mind, noting this promise is like Obama’s promise to have all health care legislation negotiations on C-SPAN. If he keeps the promise, it opens the door for good reforms; if he breaks his promise, it’s another fantastic illustration that he’s full of… it.
Krugman is despondent:
And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”
Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.
Yay.
Give us the House and Senate in November 2010, and we might just be able to re-elect this guy…
Update: With senators like Marco Rubio!
If I didn’t think this guy was a blue Liberal (in the Canadian sense) anyway, I would say that the retreat is turning into a rout. Since I do think he is basically a small c conservative (again in the Canadian sense), this is no surprise. After all, Paul Martin made his career, killing the deficit.
Clearly Americans must help their president in this quest, by giving him a Congress which is friendly to this goal — viz., conservative Republican.
:p
The reason it’s going to play terribly is that it won’t do anything about the deficit. There are plenty of votes in reducing deficits. There are also plenty of votes in spending lots of money. There are not so many in making a big show of kindof sortof pretending to reduce the deficit, but not really. It’s splitting the middle in a way that doesn’t convince anyone.
I think President Obama is starting to have an authenticity problem.
He and his people have a habit of playing word games with the electorate — you saw it some during the campaign, and you especially saw it during the Sotomayor hearings, and during the health care debate (let’s put ten years of taxes against eight years of spending and call it budget-neutral!)…
Has to be careful, because once the electorate stops believing you, it’s all up…