The Road to Additional Stimulus

David Leonhardt says Democrats lost their sense of urgency on economic recovery too soon. Jon Chait responds that " I just don't see many ways the political system, with its extreme partisanship and routine filibustering, could have accomodated more fiscal stimulus."

Fortunately, my TAP Online column today addresses this:

Marketing and public relations are nice, but opinion is fundamentally driven by results. And on this, Obama has it backward. A party whose leaders realized that economic results were the most important driver of public opinion wouldn't have renominated a conservative Republican to head the Federal Reserve. Even more astoundingly, having given Ben Bernanke a second term in office, the Obama administration didn't get around to nominating anyone to fill the other vacant posts on the Federal Reserve Board until April 2010. Then, once the nominations were made, Senate Democrats didn't speed the hearings and confirmation process along. One of Obama's nominees, Peter Diamond, actually managed to win a Nobel Prize in economics while still languishing in confirmation limbo.

Similarly, the extent of stimulus possible in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was famously limited by the need to gain Republican support. Given that, shouldn't someone have put reconciliation instructions into the budget resolution that would have allowed for additional stimulus to be undertaken by majority vote? Instead, Senate Democrats wound up spending much of 2010 in painstaking negotiations with a handful of New England Republicans, desperately trying to eke out a few more dollars.

A lot of liberals seem to prefer a quantity-based approach to second-guessing the Obama administration's decisions. In this telling, the gang in the White House are history's greatest monsters and they've been doing everything wrong. I disagree. I think they've mostly been making the right calls. But that's not to say they haven't made mistakes. Instead it's to say that the mistakes they have made were a lot bigger than people generally realize.

Now to be clear, Democrats would be losing huge numbers of House seats under any plausible scenario. But the Harry Reids and Alexei Gianoulises and Russ Feingolds of the world could be in much better shape if a couple of things had been done differently.