RSS Feed MenuMy latest column for The Week examines Obama’s mistake in pushing for healthcare reform instead of focusing on the voters’ number one concern: the economy.
Whether it is Republicans who wish to privatize Social Security or Democrats who wish to universalize healthcare, it is always dangerously tempting for partisans to substitute what they wish to do for what the electorate demands they do.
The Obama team succumbed to temptation, seizing upon the recession as an opportunity to cram through a big healthcare reform — a dream of Democrats since the 1940s.
But that plan was based on a high-risk gamble — that the Obama stimulus plan would deliver results within a reasonable time. If the gamble proved right, if unemployment topped at the 8 percent level predicted by the administration’s economists, then the White House would have the credit and clout to push through its next big plan.
That assumption failed.
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balconesfault // Jan 28, 2010 at 5:11 pm
The question is – what could/should Obama have actively done in the last year to promote the economy that he did not do?
Right off the bat, he pushed through the centerpiece of his economic agenda. But while people have been impatient over results, the Stimulus Plan was never designed to instantly pump money into the economy – it established a lengthy process for public and private entities to bring proposals to tap into the funds, and for those proposals to be reviewed, before the money really started flowing. As such, it was back end loaded to provide much of the actual spending in FY 2010.
Too much tinkering in the interim wasn’t really called for, then. Obama should have been a cheerleader for economic growth, and he was … but from a legislative standpoint it was healthy to wait and see how the economy responded to the stimulus. Overreaction as the unemployment rate crested 10% might have more rapidly brought down the unemployment rate, but it just as likely could have touched off a currency devaluation that could have quickly resulted in hyperinflation.
In short – the scorecard is still out as to how well the stimulus plan will work, but I don’t exactly know what he should have done 6 months ago, that he was distracted from either because of healthcare or the Afghanistan deliberations (it seems that much of the summer/fall Obama actually neglected healthcare in order to craft his Afghan policy), that would have been likely to improve things without significant downside risk.
Kanzeon // Jan 28, 2010 at 6:55 pm
Past history teaches that major health care reform requires a major expenditure of political capital and probably a supermajority in the Senate. That would be the case regardless of whether the Republicans were obstructionist on other issues.
Delaying health care was not an option.
Anyway, it is possible for a President to do two things at once.