The editors of the New York Times:
There are many theories about the import of Scott Brown’s upset victory in the race for Edward Kennedy’s former Senate seat. To our minds, it is not remotely a verdict on Mr. Obama’s presidency, nor does it amount to a national referendum on health care reform — even though it has upended the effort to pass a reform bill, which Mr. Obama made the centerpiece of his first year.
Mr. Obama has done many important things on the environment, and in foreign affairs, and in preventing the nation’s banking system from collapsing in the face of a financial crisis he inherited. But he seems to have lost touch with two core issues for Americans: their jobs and their homes.
and those of the somewhat more moderate Christian Science Monitor:
Democrats are sifting through the rubble that once was their “supermajority†in the US Senate, looking for portents and implications.
The stunning victory by conservative Republican Scott Brown in a special election for the Massachusetts US Senate seat held by Edward Kennedy should push the White House to rethink the Obama agenda.
If “All politics is local,†as another Bay State politician, former Speaker of the US House Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. famously put it, then it would be wrong to discount entirely the local factors in the race. Did Democratic candidate Martha Coakley run too bland and passive a campaign, lack a clear message, and allow her opponent to define her? Even a last-minute visit from the president failed to ignite any passion for Ms. Coakley’s candidacy.
In strong contrast, Mr. Brown found a resonant local message in railing against the Democratic “machine†that has dominated the commonwealth’s politics for decades. Just last year the speaker of the Massachusetts House, a Democrat, resigned amid allegations that he misused his office to favor friends and relatives. The two previous House speakers, also Democrats, resigned under the same cloud of ethics investigations.
both interpret the results of the by-election in Massachusetts somewhat as I have.
So does Nate Silver:
Clearly also, the quality of the candidates and the campaign matters a lot, especially in open seat races. Although it might seem strange to have a Republican Senator from Massachusetts, it is not dramatically more strange than having a Democratic Senator from Alaska or Nebraska, or a Republican Representative from New Orleans, all of which our Congress already had before tonight. Martha Coakley, needless to say, was not a good candidate and did not run a good campaign.
Finally, there is a third category: contingencies specific to Massachusetts, but not specific to Coakley. This was a state in which Democrats had twice changed the rules governing Senate succession, first in 2004 to prevent then-governor Mitt Romney from appointing a Republican to take John Kerry’s seat (should he have been elected President), and then again last year to allow Deval Patrick to appoint an interim appointee. Moreover, because it was a special election, the time frame of the campaign was dramatically compressed, making it harder to define the Republican opponent or to recover from any initial missteps in the campaign. Lastly, Massachusetts is unusual in that it already has universal health care and the Democratic health care plan would not do it much good, which allowed the Republican to promise to oppose it without looking like a typical partisan hack.
Were the voters of Massachusetts sending a message to the White House? Possibly. But in my view the message was more “It’s the economy, stupid” than it was ”No socialized medicine!” or ”NObama!”.
That puts President Obama in a difficult position. Other than as Cheerleader-in-Chief and signing the bills enacted by the Congress the president doesn’t have a great deal of influence on the economy. What is he to do?
First and foremost, a healthy economy makes for healthy banks. The opposite is not necessarily the case. Attention has already been paid to the banks. They still have the “toxic assets” on their books. They’re still not renegotiating mortgages. Citibank is still losing money.
I’m agnostic (or skeptical) on the actual empirical effects of Keynesian stimulus but, if the president genuinely believes in it, he should support spending the remaining unspent funds in the 2009 stimulus bill now rather than over the course of the next several years. If he doesn’t really believe in it but is merely not letting a good crisis go to waste and deploying the funds to improve his political position by directing it to friends or support pet projects, he should do just what he’s been doing.
Is it actually true that the actions of the present administration have averted a depression? The rooster crows at dawn but that doesn’t mean that his crowing raises the sun. I honestly don’t know. I wish I did.
The evidence in favor of the proposition would seem to be that we don’t have a depression. Would we have had a depression without the actions that were taken? Or did the actions that were taken, e.g. TARP, the stimulus package, “Cash for Clunkers”, the deduction for first-time home buyers, the bailouts of GM and Chrysler, merely ensure that the assets bound up in banks, auto companies, and houses stayed there, preventing the economic reorganization that is necessary for a robust recovery? In the light of how wrong the administration’s economic assumptions have been I don’t see one can reasonably take the position that the actions of the administration prevented a depression other than by dumb luck.
I think that the actions of the administration have moved the numbers a bit temporarily without addressing the underlying problems at all. I wouldn’t want to be president.
Given that the bulk of the funds are for transportation projects, this isn’t feasible. Highway projects take 3-5 years to complete, for a variety of reasons.
I think this is disingenuous: “even though it has upended the effort to pass a reform bill.” This is the one piece of information the voter had to know upon entering the polls: one of the candidates promised to upend the reform bill, and he had the ability to do it. Unlike a normal election, the voters knew the status of a highly controversial piece of legislation and knew the breakdown in the House and Senate.
I don’t disagree with much of the rest. We don’t know how many wanted to upend health reform for conservative, progressive or stupid reasons. We don’t know how many wanted to send a message to Obama and what the message might have been.
And Nate is simply spinning here. There’s nothing odd about filling Ted Kennedy’s seat after his death was eulogized in support of health care reform? People from Massachusetts are uniquely uninterested in universal health care? They were less interested in health care reform than the rule changes over the last several years?
But that is at least a rebuke of Obama’s handling of the economy, which even you think has not been the best.
I agree, this election was very strategic. Brown wins and health care reform becomes more unlikely, Coakley wins its chances of passing stay about the same. Further, my understanding is that Brown was protraying health care reform as basically a policy that will lead to higher taxes.
And overall health care reform as the current bills layout is unpopular. Hitching your wagon to that can’t help. May not hurt, but surely can’t help.
That puts President Obama in a difficult position. Other than as Cheerleader-in-Chief and signing the bills enacted by the Congress the president doesn’t have a great deal of influence on the economy. What is he to do?
How about STFU on the economy? Stop talking like he can control it? Stop talking about how he will create jobs? Stop advocating for policies that scare small to medium businesses and their investors? Instead Presidents always do the samething when it comes to the economy and what they can do: “tell lie after lie after lie after lie.*”
*Ted Kennedy
BTW/ Steve, I read this line from today’s SCOTUS decision and thought of you:
“When word concerning the plot of the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington reached the circles of Government, some officials sought, by persuasion, to discourage itsdistribution. Under Austin, though, officials could have done more than discourage its distribution—they could have banned the film. After all, it, like Hillary, was speech funded by a corporation that was critical of Members of Congress. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington may be fiction and caricature; but fiction and caricature can be a powerful force.”
Yeah I was reading about the reaction to the film in a few places. Guess I’m not surprised considering that all the politicians are shown as greedy and cowardly for the most part.
Answer this question. Has anyone ever presided over the BK proceedings for a bank as large and international as Citi or BoA? How would we negotiate over international differences? How long would it take? If 30% or 40% of our nation’s assets were tied up in BK, how would the economy have performed?
Steve
steve,
Well, when a utility goes bankrupt the lights don’t go out. The utility keeps right on operating. They also usually pile up a small hill of cash as well. During bankruptcy proceedings paying many of the bills is put on hold (you still pay for labor, buy electricity or the stuff to make electricity, etc., but other bills such as to creditors are not paid for a period of time) while things are figured out, this results in lots of money piling up.
I don’t know if that would carry over to a financial entity or not.