Subscribe to Moronmeter!Ezra Klein On Democratic Economic Strategy: Make It Maximally Dire
Liberal policy wonk Ezra Klein has a short bit at The American Prospect today about President Obama’s first budget that contains this illuminating sentence, “They in fact have an incentive to make it maximally dire so their efforts to improve matters will look maximally effective.”
I’m shocked someone actually came out and expressed this core bit of political strategy: Make things look as bad as possible, so that when things begin to look better, you can claim victory, no matter what your actual initiatives do to help or hinder the recovery.
To be sure, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) did her best to portray things in as bad a light as possible, all in an effort to get her spending priorities pushed through. On the week of January 25th, she told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, “Our economy is dark, darker, darkest.. almost.” Nope, no scare tactics there.
President Obama hit the doom and gloom pretty hard to get the spending bill passed, too. He wrote in a February 5th, Washington Post Op-Ed piece, “Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around…Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.” Where is the ‘audacity of hope’ we need?
To be fair, I think that President Obama is a stand up guy and will try to give an honest assessment of the budget situation, bad though it will undoubtedly be. It just ticks me off when I hear policy wonks advocating such crappy, political ploys. It is even worse when politicians use such ploys and no one calls them on it.
Of course, when asked what they would do, other than “lower taxes”, to get the economy going again and to get the budget under control, most conservative policy wonks and politicians had this to say:
<crickets>
Not a lot of good choices out there to listen to, are there?
Link Roundup:
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect.
Barack Obama – The Action Americans Need – washingtonpost.com.
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