John Cassidy's Blog, page 81

What Can Obama Do for the Labor Movement?

Steven Greenhouse, the labor reporter for the Times, has a fascinating piece in Thursday’s paper about the fact that union membership, as a proportion of the work force, has fallen to the lowest level since 1916. While the article focusses on the challenges facing the labor movement, it also involves larger political and economic issues. In particular, it raises the question of what, if anything, President Obama can do to help unions reverse decades of decline. And if the Republicans’ control of the House means he can’t do anything much, what does that mean for his pledge to increase the living standards of middle-class Americans?

...read more

What Kind of Liberal is Obama? An Increasingly Crafty One

From the front pages of the nation’s biggest newspapers to the Web sites of conservative magazines, to the headline on my own post—apologies for its lack of originality—the reaction was uniform: President Obama delivered the most liberal inaugural address in decades, or possibly ever. “President Barack Obama began his second term Monday with an unapologetically liberal vision,” wrote Todd J. Gillman, of the Dallas Morning News. “In effect, Mr. Obama endorsed the entire liberal agenda as the guiding star of his next four years in the White House,” Fred Barnes opined for the Wall Street Journal.

Well, that’s settled then. But what sort of “liberal” is Obama? And is he really one at all? If he is, he represents a curious blend of liberal intent and conservative instincts, insisted über-blogger Andrew Sullivan. “But beneath all of it is a Toryism of sentiment, a Burkean and Niebuhrian understanding of liberal progress, a president with a grasp that tragedy and paradox stalk the human experience,” Sullivan wrote on Monday, “…a fusion of that great conservative insight into human affairs with that great liberal passion for a better future for more and more human beings: something perfectible, but never perfect.”

...read more

Obama the Centrist Comes Out As a Liberal

With his wife Michelle having already stolen the weekend with her new bangs, and his daughters Malia and Sasha a joyful vision in magenta and purple, the thin man had a job on his hands to keep up his end of the family bargain. Sensibly, he decided to stick with a conservatively cut dark suit and let his words speak for him, which they did eloquently. Unlike most inaugural speeches, Obama’s first one included, this one exceeded expectations. Cleverly constructed, pointed, and surprisingly political, it marked the emergence of a more confident, more combative Obama—a President who knows he is personally popular and who is increasingly willing to put that popularity on the line.

Four years ago, with the economy crashing around him, and his team preparing an emergency stimulus as he spoke, he was enveloped by crisis and stuck on the fantastical idea of restoring bipartisanship to the nation’s capital. Those hopes are long gone—they finally died in the debt-ceiling fiasco of 2011. Today, Obama is more realistic. After the reverses of his first term, he realizes that the only way to succeed in Washington is to lay down some markers and then mobilize your supporters, and the public at large, to get them enacted.

...read more

Before the Fall: Disaster Myopia at the Fed

Like many other journalists who write about the Federal Reserve, I spent Friday morning reading the policy discussions that took place inside the central bank in 2007, as the global financial system teetered on the brink of collapse. Under a commendable policy of glasnost, introduced by Alan Greenspan and extended by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s policy-making arm, now releases full transcripts of its deliberations after a delay of five years.

Covering eight meetings (four of which lasted two days each) and three emergency conference calls, the newly released transcripts run thousands of pages—a boon for future historians, as well as for reporters looking for nuggets to enliven their Twitter feeds. For anybody interested in what turned out to be the biggest financial crisis since the nineteen-thirties, it is fascinating to relive the Fed’s internal debates, as it grappled with the collapse of the market for subprime mortgage bonds and its ramifications for Wall Street and the broader economy.

...read more

Let’s Get the Facts to Reduce Gun Violence

With opponents of gun control already trotting out the line that President Obama’s new proposals aren’t worth pursuing because they won’t work, it is worth recalling the famous words of Mr. Gradgrind, the dictatorial headmaster in Dickens’s “Hard Times”: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

Doubtless, Gradgrind went a bit far with his empiricism: informed reasoning also requires theorizing and allowing the imagination to roam. But if the theory gets detached from reality, as it did, for example, in macroeconomics during recent decades, the consequences can be disastrous. When it comes to policy making, it pays to recall Gradgrind: the first requirement is a strong grounding in empirical reality.

...read more

Can Obama and Grace McDonnell Beat the Gun Lobby?

On a day when Maureen Dowd was banging on yet again about Obama’s failures as a political cajoler, the President defied his reputation as an aloof technocrat, delivering a stirring call for tougher gun control and shamelessly tugging on the nation’s heartstrings. After Joe Biden made the policy presentation, explaining the proposals generated by his task force, the President delivered an emotional pitch that would have done credit to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or any other politician endowed with what Dowd and many of her fellow Washington Pooh-Bahs would define as the requisite amount of Irish blarney.

...read more

Jack Lew to Treasury: A Caterpillar Emerges From His Cocoon

I’m rushing for a plane and don’t have time to say much about the heavily trailed confirmation that President Obama will be naming Jack Lew, his unassuming and under-the-radar Chief of Staff, as the next Treasury Secretary. But a few quick points:

Lew shouldn’t have any trouble getting confirmed, which is important. Having done two stints as head of the Office of Management and Budget—a job he held under Obama and Bill Clinton—he’s been through the confirmation process twice, so there shouldn’t be many surprises there. He’s known as a tough negotiator, and some Republicans don’t particularly like him, but that shouldn’t be enough to derail him.

...read more

Why the Feds Should Have Been Tougher on Google

If you live in west Chelsea or visit the area on a regular basis, Tuesday was your lucky day. Partnering with a local business-improvement organization, Google announced that it would be providing free outdoor wi-fi to an area extending from the West Side Highway to Eighth Avenue, which incorporates part of the meatpacking district, the Fulton Houses, and much of the gallery district. In a press release, Google said that the area would be the first “wired neighborhood” in Manhattan and the biggest contiguous wi-fi network in the city.

...read more

Hagel’s Views on Israel Aren’t the Only Issue

So now it’s official: Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator, is President Obama’s pick to be the next Secretary of Defense. Ignoring complaints by certain pro-Israel and gay-rights groups, Obama appeared with Hagel at the White House and described him as “the leader who our troops deserve”—a man who would be the first enlisted soldier and the first Vietnam veteran to run the Pentagon.

...read more

An Optimistic (and Clintonian) Case for the Fiscal-Cliff Deal

Thank goodness for the House G.O.P. ultras—Eric Cantor, Allen West, Michele Bachmann, Steve Scalise, and the rest of the crazy gang who voted against the fiscal-cliff deal. That’s what they must be thinking in the White House right now. A few days ago, President Obama was facing a potential rebellion on the left for caving to the Republicans. Now many progressives are having second thoughts. If the Republican ultras hate the deal so much, they are thinking, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad one after all. “Calm Down Liberals, Obama Won,” said the headline over an upbeat post from Ezra Klein that encapsulates the revisionist view.

...read more