John Ellis on the Obama Reset

With President Obama giving the State of the Union message tonight, you've no doubt seen loads and loads of reports and commentaries on Year One of the Obama administration. What he will or won't say in the speech. And what will happen going forward.

Among the best things I've come across on this topic is a recent post titled, "Reset" by John Ellis on his blog. If you're someone who is reflexively pro-Obama or anti-Obama, it is probably not worth your time. But if you're someone realizing he's our president for the next three years (at least), and that there are real problems -- like the fact that our nation is broke financially -- then I highly recommend it.

Here's just one of many key parts:

The answer, I think, is that whatever pivot is made will be irrelevant. The fact is President Obama doesn't have the luxury of proposing an agenda. Agendas (or at least, agendas as we have come to think of them) are for people who have money. The United States is broke. And the debt is gets worse by the day.

Therefore, President Obama's job is to get us out of debt (or start us down the path toward that end). This job would be difficult in the best of times. President Obama has to do it in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s. He has to do it in the midst of two wars in regions perpetually hostile to foreign influence.

And this:

That being the case, and I think it is inarguably the case, President Obama will never be successful until he accepts the assignment that history has given him. No one (anywhere) believes for one moment that he can add 30-35 million people to the health insurance rolls and not increase (sharply) the cost of health insurance. President Obama has been peddling this fable for months now and it has only served to make him look either (a) naive, or (b) utterly cynical. No one believes that "cap and trade" legislation is anything like an urgent priority at this time. No one believes that securing the Olympics for Chicago in 2016 is an urgent use of the President's time. No one believes that President Obama deserved or should have accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. The reason that Obama has seen his approval rating fall sharply is that people think he's not doing his job.

Finally:

"Stop spending money you don't have" was the real message of the Massachusetts Senate election that vaulted Senator-elect Brown from the back benches of one of the most useless political institutions in America (the Massachusetts State Senate) onto the front page of The New York Times. "Do your job," was the other, direct message to President Obama. It's a hard job, everyone agrees. But he campaigned for it. He wanted it, or at least he said he did. Either he steps up and starts to do his job or he's a one-term wonder; an interesting, but ultimately unimportant toll booth attendant on the road to the insolvency of the United States of America.

Comments

[Jan Rogozinski]

(1) 90% of economists will disagree with you saying that we must cut government spending during a recession.

(2) Is government spending actually growing? When one includes all the states as well as the Feds. The states are cutting back drastically.

(3) The safest cuts would be cuts in military spending,where there is the most waste, especially on unneeded weapons systems, where planes cost a billion dollars each and then can't fly.

(4) Tax hikes on the very wealthy would hurt the economy the least. I.e., take the caps off Medicare/social security taxes.

[John]

Jan: (1) Economists long for economics to be considered a "science," when it is in fact an ongoing philosophical debate. Most of them never thought we were in a housing bubble, and before that didn't think we were in an Internet bubble. And I doubt many of the economists thought it was a good idea to cut government spending when we weren't in recession.

(2) Government spending has exploded, and has been for some time (pre-Obama). Keep in mind, plenty of stuff is "off budget."

(3) I'm all for a non-interventionist foreign policy, which would reduce our military spending greatly. But military spending as measured by GDP is nowhere near as high as, say, during the JFK administration in the Cold War.

(4) Heck, just take every penny the very wealthy have and you couldn't run the government more than a few weeks. Sorry, the "very wealthy" dog won't hunt. The big things are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And they're going broke. GWB got his Republican congress to add a hugely expensive Medicare prescription drug plan, and that irresponsible act is surpassed only by Obamacare, which hopefully is dead.

[sfgirl]

I don't think it is only up to Obama to restore everything. The senate and the house need to be able to re-adjust if we are to fix anything.

[John]

sfgirl: I don't think John Ellis, who I linked to, believes it is up to Obama to restore everything. I certainly don't. I do think John Ellis' constructive criticism is spot-on. Thanks for reading and commenting.