The Tragedy and Stupidity of the President's Reelection Strategy

Robert Reich reports enormously disturbing news about President Obama's political strategy: "I’m told White House political operatives are against a bold jobs plan. They believe the only jobs plan that could get through Congress would be so watered down as to have almost no impact by Election Day. They also worry the public wouldn’t understand how more government spending in the near term can be consistent with long-term deficit reduction. And they fear Republicans would use any such initiative to further bash Obama as a big spender.

    "So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it’s politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama – to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington’s paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia."

    I hope this is not true. If it is, (1) Obama cares more about his reelection than the public interest; (2) Obama has no conception of his capacity and moral duty to lead the public on how the problem of unemployment needs to be solved; (3) Obama is deluded if he thinks the American people can be distracted from the unemployment problem; (4) Obama can rightly be charged with not trying to seriously address the unemployment problem; and (5) Obama apparently does not realize that if he tried  seriously to address the unemployment problem, he not only would be backed by his party and the public, but also if the Republicans predictably refused to go along and continued with their smoke and mirrors approach to dealing with unemployment, their intransigence would be counted against them in the Presidential, House, and Senate elections.

Obama yesterday chided Congress for putting party before country. If Reich is right, Obama is putting himself ahead of party and country.

Comments

[Jimbino]

Maybe Obama does not want to repeat the FDR depression of 1937. He may be well aware of the fact that there may not be a Hitler to bail us out of the socialism this time.