-White House photo by Pete Souza-
Pick a medium and chances are Barack Obama was on it or in it last week: cable television, radio, YouTube, newspapers. The soon-to-be Commander-in-Chief is playing the role of Salesman-in-Chief, hyping, explaining and pitching his economic stimulus package to a public who will certainly find the final price tag a little terrifying. Obama is intentionally following the footstep of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who played a similar public role as he sold a stimulus package to a nation in the depths of the Depression. As serious as Obama’s plan is for the present economy, it’s even more crucial for him. If he gets what he’s asking for from Congress, he’ll have the political capital to do almost whatever he wants for the next 8 years. But if he fails, he could have some serious problems living up to all of his promises of change.
On paper, Obama’s stimulus package — which has its share of strong and weak points — looks pretty viable. The key idea is that it pumps new money — not existing money from tax breaks — onto the economy. (Although there will probably be some tax cuts included to appease Republicans.) As part of a piece I wrote on Oregon’s stimulus efforts for this month’s magazine, I interviewed an economics professor at the University of Oregon who put it this way: You can’t shift money from one part of the economy to another and create growth. “On the federal level they can run a deficit and borrow money against the future. On the state level you can’t do that,” he says. “The federal government can do effective short-term stimulus.”
You’re going to hear Obama talk about that principle again and again and again in the coming weeks. “Mr. Obama’s aides said that for the next three weeks, he would pack his schedule with interviews, speeches, news conferences and limited travel to try to rally public support behind the effort. The overall political goal, aides said, was to ensure that Mr. Obama’s economic recovery program was approved quickly by a substantial bipartisan vote in Congress, while at the same time playing down public hopes about how quickly it might work,” wrote Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times.
But what’s missing from the discussion right now? Wiretapping. Torture. Even health care, which has an estimated $650 negative impact on the economy each year. Right now, Obama’s holding off from making any big pronouncements. From The NYT: “In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”
If he ends up looking like a hero with his stimulus plan, I’m sure we’ll hear how he’ll fix those problems. But if not, it’s anyone’s guess.
“Everybody’s going to have to give,” Obama said on This Week when talking about the stimulus plan. “Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game.”
Obama, perhaps, more than anyone else.
