Politics

Obama Syndrome – Tom Friedman’s Diagnosis

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Tea Party Protest - Barack Obama

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In his latest New York Times column, Thomas Friedman succinctly puts into words what many centrists and probably nearly all frustrated liberals will immediately identify as one of the Obama administration’s biggest political failures thus far into his first term – Obama’s inability to properly sell his accomplishments, and their failure to prevent these accomplishments from being distorted and turned into electoral liabilities by the Republican opposition.

Friedman complains:

Barack Obama is a great orator, but he is the worst president I’ve ever seen when it comes to explaining his achievements, putting them in context, connecting with people on a gut level through repetition and thereby defining how the public views an issue.

True, though this is an age old complaint about Democratic politics – the inability to remain cohesive and on-message, and to deliver a point that is consistent, compelling, and easy to repeat and digest.

On what is perhaps Obama’s signature first term accomplishment – however imperfect it may be – reforming the US healthcare system, Friedman delivers the kind of blunt, incontrovertible smackdown of Republican talking points that make people like me want to shout out in agreement and kiss the screen:

“Obamacare is socialized medicine,” says the Republican Party. No, no — excuse me — socialized medicine is what we have now! People without insurance can go to an emergency ward or throw themselves on the mercy of a doctor, and the cost of all this uncompensated care is shared by all those who have insurance, raising your rates and mine. That is socialized medicine and that is what Obamacare ends. Yet Obama — the champion of private insurance for all — has allowed himself to be painted as a health care socialist.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It’s painful that anyone should have to school the Republican party, the self proclaimed champions of fiscal conservatism, in such basic economic concepts as the free rider problem, but if someone has to do it then there is no one who can do so with more style than Tom Friedman. I’m not sure that I have it in me to hear one more Tea Partier lambasting Obamacare and lamenting that the US now has a socialised healthcare system and that he is being made to pay for his neighbour’s keep, without just straight up asking him “well, what the hell do you think you were doing before, idiot?”

And on the somewhat topical subject of government spending and deficits:

Finally, how did Obama ever allow this duality to take hold: “The Bush tax cuts” versus the “Obama bailout”? It should have been “the Bush deficit explosion” and the “Obama rescue.” Sure, the deficit has increased under Obama. It was largely to save the country from going into a Depression after a Bush-era binge that included two wars — which, for the first time in our history, we not only did not pay for with tax increases but instead accompanied with tax cuts — plus a 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill that we could not afford, then or now. Congressional Democrats also had a hand in this, but the idea that Bush gets to skate off into history as a “tax-cutter” and not as a “deficit buster” is a travesty. You can’t just blame Fox News. Obama has the bully pulpit.

The way in which Democrats managed to lose control of the narrative and allow the party who led America into two unfunded wars, a round of unfunded tax cuts and an unfunded expansion of Medicare (oh yes – socialised medicine, too) to reclaim any credibility whatsoever in terms of economic understanding or fiscal responsibility will forever astound me. And Friedman is right, Obama has the bully pulpit. He, his team and his spokespeople should have been sending out the right message from the start, and not have allowed themselves to have been forced to play defense.

To be fair – and as Friedman notes – sometimes actions speak louder than words, and in several notable instances the Obama administration’s actions have been as much of a reason for disappointment as the selling of their message. For me, the almost unforgivable failure of the Obama administration was the failure to embrace and push forward the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan, which enjoyed considerable support (if not quite enough to mandate an up-or-down vote in the House and Senate) and which would have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that Obama was serious about medium term deficit reduction. The Obama administration’s reticence on this point enraged many a centrist Obama supporter, and led blogger Andrew Sullivan to declare:

My own view, however, is that Obama badly bungled this by not embracing his current position in the State of the Union and pummeling the GOP with it for months. Bowles Simpson was his commission after all, and yet he dropped it like a stone and pandered to his left when he had a perfect moment to pivot to the debt question. Giving the GOP any credibility on debt by offering nothing of real $4 trillion substance until last week may well be seen as Obama’s greatest mistake in his first term. Now that he has finally offered it, his ability to maintain the high ground on a fair measure to tackle the deficit is much reduced from his January possibility. This is not a meep-meep moment. And it could easily have been, if Obama had shown, yes, courage sooner … On this score, leading from behind has been pretty much a disaster. And there is no longer much time to lead from the front.

So there are problems here of action as well as messaging. I don’t yet believe that this is cause for panic – as I have laid out in previous posts, I am very confident that given his opposition, Obama is heading for a likely landslide reelection victory. But an administration – and a party – that fails to create and stick to a positive narrative on so important a topic, deserves their fair share of woe.

But unfortunately it is not just President Obama and his administration that suffer as a result of their baleful communication efforts. For with every day that passes without a compelling, effective message from the administration about achievements won and plans for the future, the unrepentantly unreformed party of George W. “two unfunded wars” Bush and Richard “deficits don’t matter” Cheney will seem to more and more people like a potentially viable alternative to run the show again.

Obama The Inevitable – Continued

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Just as I was starting to think that everyone had bought into the myth that the upcoming US presidential election is going to be anything other than a landslide for Barack Obama, Jamelle Bouie from The American Prospect brings a healthy dose of perspective to the matter:

I don’t mean to single out partisans; actual Beltway pundits are also too concerned with gaffes and faux controversies. Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei’s assessment of the last month—which has the top spot at POLITICO—describes the Obama campaign as “stumbling out of the gate” and “struggling” with message discipline. It’s everything you would expect from a micro-focus on the election

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How much of this is remarkable, and how much of this is the usual sturm und drang of a presidential election? Campaigns always see blowback on their messaging, on account of the fact that political parties aren’t monolithic entities. Obama may have had a huge fundraising advantage in 2008, but in a polarized country where Democrats have taken steps to regulate Wall Street and raise taxes on rich people, it’s no surprise that Republicans have suddenly emerged with a fundraising advantage, and the support of interested billionaires. It would be unusual if that weren’t the case.

Hear, hear. Finally, some level-headedness on the start of Obama’s campaign.

The Republicans chose Mitt Romney as their nominee. Mitt Romney. And so unless Barack Obama is caught on camera having an extramarital affair, sneaking gold ingots from Fort Knox or peeing on the American flag while whistling jaunty showtunes, he is going to be re-elected president in November. And no-drama Obama ain’t going to be doing any of those things.

Obama The Inevitable

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Well, stop blogging for a month or so and when you come back, the world has turned a little bit. The ratcheting up of the Euro crisis, the effective end to the Republican presidential nomination process, the sudden and complete inability of David Cameron’s Conservative Party to do anything right, in terms of either action or image… Guess I learned something there. Anyway, picking up where I left off in April…

So much handwringing in the media at the moment about President Obama’s political fortunes and reelection prospects!

From Politico:

Nothing inspires Democrats like the Barack Obama swagger – the supreme self-confidence on stage, the self-certainty in private.

So nothing inspires more angst than when that same Obama stumbles, as he has leaving the gate in 2012.

That’s the unmistakable reality for Democrats since Obama officially launched his reelection campaign three weeks ago. Obama, not Mitt Romney, is the one with the muddled message — and the one who often comes across as baldly political. Obama, not Romney, is the one facing blowback from his own party on the central issue of the campaign so far — Romney’s history with Bain Capital. And most remarkably, Obama, not Romney, is the one falling behind in fundraising.

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National polls, which had shown Obama with a slight but steady lead over Romney through April, moved into a virtual tie this month — despite Romney’s clumsy conclusion to the GOP race.

And from The Daily Beast:

The dirty little secret of campaigns is that there are usually just two messages. Either: Stay the Course or It’s Time for a Change. When Barack Obama won 53 percent of the popular vote and carried 28 states, just 14 percent of Americans thought we were moving in the right direction. So it was obviously a Time for a Change election. When Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton coasted to easy reelections, the country’s mood was undeniably Stay the Course. The election coming up in November is stuck in between. Americans don’t know whether to forge ahead or swing back.

And watching from across the pond, The Daily Telegraph:

There are storm clouds on the horizon for Barack Obama’s re-election.

Democrats indulged in over-confidence during the Republican primaries. It was an understandable reaction to the chaos that came with all the pandering to the far-Right and the rise of frankly laughable candidates like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain in the search for an alternative to Mitt Romney.

After that debacle, the Romney campaign manager’s promise of an “etch-a-sketch” moment to re-shake and re-shape public perception about their candidate seemed a dose too hopeful.

But only a month after the Republican primaries all but officially ended, we have a real horserace on our hands.

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According to a new Washington Post/ABC poll, 30 percent of Americans say they are worse off than when President Obama took office in the depths of the fiscal crisis. This is comparable to the numbers President George HW Bush faced when he lost re-election to Bill Clinton in 1992.

And right now Obama and Romney are essentially tied when registered voters are asked who would be better at creating jobs and handling the economy.

Why do we do this to ourselves?  Why spend so much time speculating about an event the outcome of which is almost a foregone conclusion?

I understand the motives of the professional media. People will not tune in to The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer or Hardball with Chris Matthews in significant numbers to get their daily dose of the campaign ups and downs if they think that the result is already assured. That would mean less advertising revenues for the networks, and a huge army of unemployed cable news talking heads who would suddenly flood the market and push unemployment back up above 9%. So the word must continue to go out that the uninspirational, unpersonable technocrat who is unable to motivate his base and who campaigns like an electioneering android with a gaffe bug actually poses a serious threat to Obama’s reelection chances.

With regard to the professional media, I think there is also the bias factor. And by that I don’t mean the fact that all news outlets are biased in one direction or another, but actually the fact that all of the television and most print sources (even Fox News to some extent) strive to appear “balanced” when reporting the news, to tell both sides of the story (even if, in Fox’s case, the tone of voice, facial expressions and screen captions help to “guide” the viewer as to which side is correct).

At some point – and not being a student of journalism and media I don’t know when – good television reporting stopped meaning uncovering and reporting the truth, but rather reporting and giving equal weight to both sides of a story. So if Sam says the world is round but Bob says that it is a perfect cube, today’s headline will read “Sam and Bob spar in congress over shape of the world” rather than “Bob effectively ends his career with insane statement”.

But why do we ordinary people do it to ourselves? Are we just led by the media, or is there something else at work too?

I suppose that I will be doing the blogging walk of shame come November this year if the unthinkable occurs and Romney does become president-elect. But seriously. Are we all really so bored and in need of intrigue that we are going to kid ourselves that this one is even going to be close?

Wait A Second.

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Politico reports that Republicans are protesting that the Democrats are refusing to help them undo automatic cuts to the defense budget agreed as part of the previous debt ceiling deal. Apparently, allowing these automatic cuts to government spending to take effect would risk plunging the US economy back into recession:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76749.html

Sen. Harry Reid’s refusal to “back off” looming cuts to the Pentagon won’t just harm the nation’s security, Republicans say. It could plunge the fragile U.S. economy back into a recession next year.

GOP defense hawks struck back at the Senate majority leader Thursday for insisting he won’t stave off or delay $600 billion in automatic defense cuts unless Republicans budge on new revenues.

President Barack Obama’s top military advisers, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, have warned that the so-called defense sequestration would weaken national security, Republicans said. And a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office this week handed the GOP more ammunition: It concluded that spending cuts and tax hikes set to take effect in January would stall the economic recovery — at least in the short term.
Yes. Republicans, who have been busy blaming Obama’s stimulus package and increased government spending in general for the current slow rate of economic growth in the US, now say that cutting government spending would put the recovery in jeopardy. Hmm.

 

Okay, so what do we learn from this snazzy little pirouette by congressional Republicans? Wait, “learn” is the wrong word, let me rephrase. What tired, depressing old certainty is reinforced upon our weary souls by this latest spat?

1. When Democrats expand or maintain government spending for their pet projects (infrastructure, public services, welfare), it increases the deficit, adds to the national debt and is a grave mistake, but when Republicans expand or maintain government spending for their pet projects (like defense), they are taking vital steps to prevent a double-dip recession.

2. People will invoke the Congressional Budget Office to win an argument whenever the CBO pronouncement supports what they want to do, and they will ignore it or trash it if the CBO pronouncement suggests that what they want to do may be unwise.

Neither party exactly makes a serious play for the fiscal responsibility trophy here, but for sheer, barefaced hypocrisy on the matter, it is definitely the Republicans who flunk this round.

What Exactly Is Your Fair Share?

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Tax Fair Share Flat Tax

 

As every British taxpayer knows, this week the coalition Conservative/Liberal Democrat government will announce its budget for the coming fiscal year. And as usual, there is much speculation about what bold, eye-catching new initiatives will be announced, which favoured groups will receive the best and most insulting handouts (10p per week increase for those on the state pension, anyone?) and which of our cherished vices such as smoking or drinking will be slapped with the biggest tax increases to raise money to pay for it all.

But probably the biggest pre-budget story at the moment concerns the speculation that the government is poised to repeal the last Labour government’s spiteful, punitive, ugly and counterproductive 50% top marginal rate of income tax which they imposed just before being booted from office, either eliminating it entirely in a stroke or reducing it to 45% as the first step of a phased elimination.

Cue much indignation, huffing and puffing from the British left, who talk all the time of the importance of “the wealthy” or “the rich” paying “their fair share”.

Their fair share. What exactly does this phrase mean? It is grotesquely overused in British political and fiscal discussions at the moment, by both left and right. It is used by the left as an attack – “taking benefits and tax credits from hard working people while never asking the rich to pay their fair share!”-  and by the right as a defence – “ensuring that we are all in this together, and that those who can afford the most pay their fair share”.

So what is fairness when it comes to tax policy?

You could argue that since we all live in the same country and benefit from the same infrastructure, public services and national defence, the total bill for government spending should be divided equally between all people of a working age in this country. We can all avail ourselves of the public schools, the National Health Service and the roads in this country, so we should all pay the same toward their continued existence. So what if you’re on minimum wage and your tax bill for the year is greater than your income? Well, everyone has to pay their fair share, so better get a second, third and fourth job if you want to pay your tax bill and still eat. Otherwise it’s not fair to everyone else.

You could argue that some people use certain public services a lot more than others, and that aside from the national umbrella of national defence it is not fair to make any two people pay the same amount if they use different services, and that the best thing to do is to abolish the majority of taxes and move toward a pay-per-use scheme. So what if you’re on minimum wage and you don’t have the money you need to see the doctor? Too bad, you’ll have to make your own arthritis medicine yourself out of pressed flowers and tree bark.

You could accept that those who have been financially successful and/or fortunate should shoulder a greater burden of government spending in real terms, but that to ask them to pay a larger proportion of their incomes just because they are rich is offensive and unfair, and in this case you would support a flat tax system, where everybody pays the same rate. Everyone then gets access to the public services that they need, and everyone pays the same percentage of his or her income to support those services. Perfectly fair, no?

Alternatively, you could accept the premise that those with greater incomes should pay a higher proportion of that income in tax, in addition to paying more purely in real terms. And that’s pretty much the system we have in place here and pretty much everywhere else in the western world, a stepped, progressive tax system. If you earn little to no money you pay little to no tax either in real terms or as a percentage, and as your income grows, so does your tax liability. A lot of people think that this is fair.

My point is that each of these solutions can be described on one way or another as being “fair”. The word doesn’t really mean anything on its own, it is only given meaning through the context in which it is used, which is entirely based on your political beliefs. But in British political discourse it is always used to mean, in some general fuzzy way, that “other”, “richer” people more prosperous than us than us should pay more to cover all the bills. It is used lazily to impart a pious aura of nobility to demands for what are already significant transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor in this country at best, or counterproductive and demotivational daylight robbery at worst.

Under the present tax code in Britain, if you earn more than £150,00o in income in a given year, each additional pound you earn above that level to infinity is taxed at 50%. The income you earned between about £40,000 and £149,999 was taxed at 40%. And this doesn’t include the other huge tax-in-all-but-name, National Insurance, which means that many people earning much over £70,000 pay marginal tax rates greater than half of each additional pound that they earn. A yearly salary of £70,000 may sound like – and be – a lot of money, but if you are a family on a single income with several children, living in the South East, you’re not exactly the Monopoly Man. What’s fair about asking for more than half of that person’s hard-earned pay rise in additional tax contributions?

In order to win Liberal Democrat approval to cut the top rate of income tax down from the punishingly high 50% level, the Conservatives will doubtless have to make a number of concessions. Some of these may yet be sensible, such as moves to shift the burden of tax away from earned income (i.e. more ‘productive’ money) and more toward unearned income and wealth. This would help to ensure that income is reinvested in the economy, though whether it is the role of government to meddle in this way is not entirely clear. Some of the other concessions will doubtless take the form of yet more envious, baseless pokes at the rich. It is probably worth the government’s while taking most of these jabs in good humour in order to ensure the repeal of one of the highest marginal tax rates in the western world, a huge dampener on British competitiveness.

But whether the top rate drops down to 45% or back to 40% where it has been since Margaret Thatcher’s day, prepare for a lot of noise from the left and a lot of opportunistic point-scoring from the Labour Party. Be assured that these talking points have already been written and are waiting to be deployed as soon as George Osborne stands up at the despatch box in the House of Commons to read his statement. We will hear that he cares only about looking after his rich friends and is not concentrating on doing anything for the poor (because, of course, the government can only ever have one priority at a time, the rich OR the poor, and a policy that ostensibly benefits the rich could never also benefit the economy as a whole, and therefore everyone who works in it – and no, I’m not talking about “trickle-down economics”). We will see every rhetorical trick under the sun being deployed to convince the population that now is the wrong time to be focusing on “the wealthy few” when “the hard-working majority” are suffering. So expect all of this, and more. But regardless of the merit of these individual arguments, they all miss the point by a country mile.

Are there a myriad of loopholes in the current tax code that need to be closed? Absolutely.

Do further efforts need to be made to clamp down on tax fraud, and make tax avoidance more difficult? Sure.

Do we need to look again at tax rules for non-domiciled individuals, in terms of their income and property taxes? Almost certainly.

So let’s press for the government to include such measures in the upcoming budget.

But please, let us separate these issues – and the plight of the multi-millionaires and billionaires and bankers and premier league footballers that we hear about in the newspapers – from the doctor or accountant who maybe earns £200,000 a year and who now doesn’t want to take on that extra patient or new client because she is worn out, working hard trying to get ahead and to pay her “fair share” to an insatiable country.