Wondering what the Obama administration is going to do about the jobs crisis? So, it seems, is everybody else. Even the Obama administration.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published an excellent account of a peculiar argument going on inside the White House. The political team, led by Chief of Staff Bill Daley and campaign Svengali David Plouffe, doesn’t want President Obama wasting his time or alienating swing voters by arguing for jobs bills Congress won’t pass. Better to work on deficit reduction, which they consider “an economic and political imperative.”
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.
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The economists, led by Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economics Council and pushed along by the public encouragement of ex-Obama advisers like Lawrence Summers and Christina Romer, think the economy needs significant action on jobs and believe the debt-ceiling debate — which ended in the formation of a deficit-reduction “supercommittee” that punts the issue till late in the fall — has left room for a renewed push.
What’s curious about this argument is how inconsequential it is. If the political team wins, the jobs proposals that won’t pass will be somewhat smaller, and the president will talk somewhat more about deficit reduction. If the economic team wins, the jobs proposals will be somewhat larger, and the president will speak somewhat more angrily about Republican obstruction. My heart is with the economic team here, but my head says neither strategy will register in the unemployment rate. And I have trouble caring about strategies that won’t register in the unemployment rate.
Imagine this debate going on in a Republican White House, or even a Republican Congress. It’s laughable to imagine that Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) would start touring the country with his pro-jobs message, or scheduling more speeches lamenting Obama’s woeful inattention to a mounting human crisis. It’s even less plausible to suggest that his advisers would rein him back because Democrats and swing voters might get offended. This is the party that just voted to privatize and voucherize Medicare to leverage influence over the national debate over entitlements.
How would Republicans do this? Just look at how they’ve already done it. Over the past year, they have aggressively and effectively wrenched the conversation to something between deficit reduction, which they say they support because it’s popular, but will stop supporting if it includes tax increases and spending cuts. And they haven’t relied on persuasion. It’s not been speeches or bus tours. Their position hasn’t even led in the polls. They have done it by identifying the leverage available to them and wielding it aggressively.
The debt-ceiling debate shows the force Republicans are willing to apply to achieve spending cuts, and that Democrats are not willing to apply to achieve action on jobs. The Republican position, which rejected tax increases on the rich — or anyone else — while demanding big cuts in education, Medicare and other programs, was not popular. But the strategy, which refused to raise the debt ceiling until the administration agreed to spending cuts sans tax increases, was effective. And if the administration really believes that voters want “tangible results rather than speeches,” there’s a lesson there.
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