I agree with James Carville that what the president is doing isn’t working and that it’s about time that President Obama fired someone. I’m not convinced that panicking is the right response to the two election losses the Democrats took on Tuesday evening though.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Attorney General Eric Holder would be a good start.
Walter Russell Mead argues that Mr. Carville is really saying that the president himself has to go:
Larry Summers and Secretary Geithner didn’t sneak into the White House and hijack his economic policy while President Obama was off making friends in the Islamic world and solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem. President Obama has made his key economic policy decisions out of conviction and calculation. He has billed himself as a reflective and cool decision maker who reviews the evidence before carefully making a decision. To make the 180 degree turn Carville wants, the President would have to have a Moses on the mountaintop, road to Damascus conversion experience. And to pull that off, he wouldn’t just have to reinvent his economic policy; he’d have to reinvent himself and reintroduce himself to the American people as a different kind of person and a different kind of leader. That would be hard to pull off at this point in his presidency; I can’t see it working.
I don’t believe that. My view is that President Obama’s confidence in experts is far too great: economic experts, military experts, foreign policy experts, environmental experts, political experts, and so on and so on. Get better experts.
That would be hard to pull off at this point in his presidency; I can’t see it working.
If he did it with energy, and it was effective, he’d get a whole lot more votes next year than he will under the current path. Of course, he hasn’t got a clue, and the political situation is such that he can’t possibly get anything done. (Even if he went full-bore Tea Party* all he’d do is loss backing from the Senate. Any move not substantially in the direction of the Tea Party is unlikely to get traction in the House.)
* Note that this is not an endorsement of Tea Party policy, just an examination of the political situation.