Did President Obama Deliberately Piss Off the House Republicans?

Earlier today, Barack Obama gave a speech in which he said that: Congressional leaders from both parties are close to a deal to avert the so-called "fiscal cliff;" that deal has not yet been reached; it is the Republicans' fault that the deal is not being reached; and the Republicans are not going to get their preferred solution to this whole situation. Rumor has it that House Republicans have been seriously pissed off at this speech, and are basically refusing to vote on anything tonight because Obama said mean things about them. What I'm wondering is whether that sequence of events might've been deliberate on Obama's part. It's been obvious all along that the fundamental logic of the deal-making favors Democratic policy results if we go over the cliff into the new year: Obama can then say to Republicans, okay, here's the Obama tax cut, and in exchange for my letting you pass it, which will be giving me what I want anyway, I'll make you give me a bunch of other stuff that I want. Republicans would be in a very difficult position to resist that tactic. So it makes sense for Obama to want to go over the cliff for a day or two. But, as has been usual for the last two years, it's quite important for him to make sure people blame Republicans for it. So making a very public display of having been working on a deal until the last minute, and getting House Republicans to sabotage any potential deal because they felt personally offended by Obama, is arguably the best of all relevant worlds. People keep doubting that Obama is incorporating the craziness of the Republicans into his strategy, which he would typically have been doing by offering more in deals than he actually wanted to give up, secure in the knowledge that House Republicans can't take yes for an answer. But I think that this time, it might well be the truth: Obama had a big noisy press conference because he wanted to throw the House Republican caucus into a hissy-fit, delivering him a more advantageous tactical situation while squarely delivering them the blame.

Happy New Year?

There's More to Domestic Policy than the Economy

The "domestic policy" debate just concluded, and in my opinion, forgetting for a moment the question of who won it, is was just a stupid as hell debate. The biggest reason for that is that the entire debate was about what are considered in political contexts "economic issues." Nothing about the environment, gay rights, women's issues, immigration, etc. "Domestic policy" means "the economy." Now, okay, sure, the economy is important. It's probably the main issue in this election. But that doesn't make it the only issue. All those other things matter! A lot! Taken in the aggregate "domestic policy but not the economy" is probably as important for the welfare of the United States of America than "economic policy" by itself. Honestly I'm kind of offended that the people putting this debate on considered taxes and budgets and deficits and "the role of government" by which they mean the economic role of government the only meaningful domestic policy issues in this election. And not just because it's an enormous softball to Romney, given that Obama is an incumbent presiding over a mediocre economy. Because it buys into the view of life that denies the importance of anything besides money, that considers material goods the only goods that matter.

I think I'll close this blog post with Robert F. Kennedy's famous quote about the failings of the Gross National Product:

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

It's Really, "Are We Better Off Now?"

"Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" is Ronald Reagan's famous campaign line from 1980, attacking incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter over the state of the economy. Of course, the answer was "yes," real per capita GDP had gone up during Carter's Presidency, though it was in a period of decline right around the election and the line probably helped Reagan win that election. Sensing that Barack Obama's greatest weakness is the continued mediocrity of the economy, Mitt Romney has taken to using the same line. The assumption seems to be that if you are better off than you were four years ago, you should vote for the incumbent, but if you're not better off, you should vote the incumbent out. Now, as I've seen Matt Yglesias point out in various posts and/or Tweets, that's a curious framework through which to view partisan electoral politics. Most of the most important aspects of individual-level well-being are not even plausibly under the control or influence of the President, or even the government, really, like romantic success or the lack thereof. Even when we narrow things down to economic well-being, there are vast amounts of idiosyncrasy and serendipity involved at the individual level. Whether I get hired, fired, promoted, or what depends at least as much on my own personal circumstances, choices, and attributes as it does the general macroeconomic climate. If I happen to have been promoted at my job because I'm really good at it, or because the guy in front of me got caught in a scandal or something, does it really make sense to interpret that as evidence that I should vote for the incumbent President?

In that light, I found this post from Dave Weigel interesting. First, as he points out, people's views of whether they're better off or not don't seem to be particularly objective or independent of partisan politics, since non-whites seem to think they are better off, whereas actual economic data begs rather strongly to differ. But what interests me is the gender gap in this question. Men split pretty damn evenly on whether or not they're better off, while a huge plurality of women say they're worse off than four years ago. I'm not entirely sure what the data are on that, though I think I remember hearing that the initial burst of recession was especially bad for men but that the recovery has helped women less than it's helped men. I'd just like to point out that women will be supporting the incumbent President in this election much, much more than men. So, something isn't working the way Romney thinks it ought to; shouldn't these women, who feel like things have gotten worse for them, be his natural constituency? I mean, it's not like the Romney campaign hasn't made that very argument on numerous occasions.

I think what's going on is that the more sensible way to interact with this question, as a matter of partisan electoral politics, is to ask whether we, as a nation, are better off now than we were four years ago. And it looks like people know it. This goes beyond the gender gap; looking at the regional data, one sees that the least happy regions are the West and the Northeast, while the South is feeling pretty good about itself. But, uh, the South ain't voting for Obama. I bet that if you asked people whether they think the country is doing better overall than it was four years ago, you'd see some rather different patterns here, and that that question would have more predictive power of people's voting intentions. Of course, one can bring a boatload of skepticism to the idea that answers to that question would be independent of people's partisan allegiances, and rightfully so. One way or another, though, it looks like voters are not taking up the Romney campaign's call to vote against Obama if your life has been rough over the last four years. Good for them.

You Don't "Build" a Company, Anyway

(Apologies for how late this post is relative to the original controversy. I'm pretty sure that this is a post I had meant to write some evening a few weeks ago, but never got around to it, and then only remembered what I had meant to write a few minutes ago.)

The conservative take on Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" line, which was of course in reality a slightly awkward of phrasing the general liberal idea that every successful business enterprise can only succeed because of a general environment of well-maintained infrastructure, a stable legal regime protecting property rights etc. that's created by the government, is that he instead alleged that small business owners did not genuinely deserve credit for the success of their businesses. This was always a stretch, for a lot of reasons one of which is that it's clearly not what Obama was saying. Moreover, many of the businesspeople that the Romney campaign has trotted out with big "WE DID BUILD IT" banners have demonstrably taken lots of government support for their businesses, which is nice and embarrassing.

But the way you know that the whole thing is nonsense, even without bothering to go back and look at the full text of Obama's speech and see that, yep, obviously the antecedent for "that" was roads and bridges and stuff, is by reading those banners. They sound ridiculous. Seriously, read that banner again. "We did build it"? "You did built that"? It just sounds absurd, on a purely linguistic level. Part of the problem is the use of the dangling pronoun, which only serves to highlight the fact that the entire Republican interpretation hinges on a flagrantly wrong reading of the original pronoun. Another part of the problem, I think, is the use of the word "build." Obama, of course, was using the word "build" in a purely literal sense. He was talking about roads and bridges, things which are built, as in constructed, and he was making the accurate observation that very few small business owners are responsible in any meaningful way (except tax dollars!) for the construction of the general infrastructure.

Now, people do use all sorts of wacky words to describe expansion and growth using transitive verbs in the economic context, most famously with the concept of "growing" the economy. I guess you might hear a person saying something like, "I built this business from the ground up," in which case they're very explicitly invoking a metaphor of physical construction. But to use the word as Romney is using it just strikes me as unnatural. You wouldn't say, "he built that business," again unless you added a modifier like "from the ground up" or "with his bare hands" to create a more specific metaphorical image. You might say "he created that business" or "he grew that business" or something. But the specific use of "build" in "we did build it" just sounds awkward and weird. And that's the very first thing about this whole bloody nonsense that should've tipped you off that it was nonsense.

Even the Very Most Independent Business Didn't Build The Roads

Apparently, some prominent speaker at the Republican National Convention this week will be a businesswoman named Sher Valenzuela. As this Daily Kos article points out, her business has received a whole effing lot of government loans and government contracts, etc. That's all very well and good for liberals looking to poke fun at Republicans' efforts to criticize Obama's "you didn't build that" remarks, by pretending he meant something completely unconnected to what he actually said. But I'd like to point out that all of this explicit government support for this business is irrelevant to how applicable Obama's actual statement is. After all, the "that" in "you didn't built that" isn't your own business. If it were, then things like the Daily Kos article might well point out that, well, yes, the government had a substantial hand in building this business. But in reality, as opposed to Republicanland, Obama meant society at large, acting through the government, is responsible for the environment of physical infrastructure, a stable legal order, etc. that's necessary for a thriving capitalistic society and necessary for any small business to succeed. You, the small business owner, didn't built that infrastructure.

Note that this is true even for the hypothetical company that's never taken a dime in explicit government support. It didn't create the whole setting of a stable, developed capitalist society that has allowed it to prosper. So all of the Small Business Administration loans taken out by Ms. Valenzuela's business are irrelevant. She didn't built that, not in the sense Obama clearly meant, and she wouldn't have built it even if those loans and contracts had never happened.

No, Social Issues Are Not A "Distraction"

It's always really easy to make parallels between the current Presidential campaign and any ol' previous campaign, because there are usually lots of similarities between any two complex things and if you just ignore the non-similarities, well, there you go. Of course, it's easier to compare this election to some previous ones than others; I have a hard time seeing the 2012-1912 parallel, for instance. One previous cycle a lot of people have compared this year's election to is the 2004 race, often noting a supposedly ironic antiparallel. That year, the thinking goes, a Republican incumbent who had been presiding over a mediocre economy and had middling, polarized approval numbers faced a rich man from Massachusetts considered unlikeable by most. The opposition party felt that the only priority was to beat the incumbent. The incumbent party wanted to talk less about the disappointing state of the economy and more about cultural issues and national security. Flip the parties, and it sounds very similar.

One particular sub-genre of the 2004/2012 comparison is when people, typically moderate-ish pro-Romney types, I think, talk about how, well, in 2004 the Bush campaign was desperate not to talk about the economy, but instead to use gay marriage and abortion as "wedge issues," and now Obama's in the same position of trying to distract from the lousy economy with social issues. The Romney campaign, of course, makes the second half of that complaint explicit, and are very adamant that everything except the continued mediocrity of the unemployment figure is a distraction. So can I just say, for the record, that this is not the case? Yeah, proper macroeconomic management is important. A lot of other things are important, too. Public policy on sex ed/birth control, a category I consider to include the morning after pill and therefore the recent Akin controversy, is tremendously important to aggregate human happiness. So, of course, is the structure of the welfare state, as Republicans are often in a mood to keep reminding us. So, actually, are gay rights, a "fringe issue" in that they only directly affect the lives of a small-ish number of people but they affect those people's lives to a very comprehensive degree.

Now, there's a sense in which the major problem with American public policy right now is the poor macroeconomic management. Matt Yglesias loves to pound that theme, and I think he makes a persuasive case both that this mismanagement is inexcusable and that it does tremendous harm, both by causing immediate suffering and by lastingly impoverishing the future. So yes, maybe in a certain way "the economy" deserves to be the #1 issue of this campaign. But that doesn't mean it deserves to be the only issue, and if we didn't live in a world where one party happens to be more wrong than the other party about almost everything all at once, I could easily imagine voting for the candidate who I thought, on balance, would do a worse job of managing the economy, if I also thought that they had a clearly better policy platform in general. The Romney campaign wants to convince people that this is wrong, and at times seems to me to be making an odd jump from political science literature suggesting that people typically vote against the incumbent if the economy is poor to the idea that people ought to do this. You can make a good case, though, that the mechanistic "economic determinism" voting pattern political science claims to uncover is a bad thing, and that people ought instead give more weight to overall ideology and policy preferences.

So stop complaining about Obama trying to "distract" us from the economy. Maybe his campaign likes it when we talk about things that aren't one of its relative weaknesses, but there's nothing wrong with that, and there's no good reason for thinking that weakness is the only thing that matters just because we call it "the economy."

Shoe-on-the-Other-Foot Syndrome

Over the past couple of years, all and sundry political commentators have pointed out that Barack Obama's re-election effort is in a bit of a tricky rhetorical position. The economy has basically felt sucky during those two years, and sucky economies are never good for incumbents. This means that Republicans get the extremely easy attack line, "The economy sucks and it's Obama's fault!" Obama, meanwhile, has nothing much to counter this attack with, except for the claim that yes, the economy sucks, but it would've sucked much worse were it not for his policies. This happens to be completely true, but it's also a very difficult political claim to make successfully. Obama might win anyway, but that would just be because people really do hate the Republicans so much on so many different levels; he would have a nearly impossible time convincing people he had actually been doing a good job.

That's all very well and good for Republicans, but there's one great big problem with this strategy. The economy is now getting somewhat better. And, more importantly from a political perspective, people are starting to perceive the economy as getting better! And this has now forced the Republicans into the same rhetorical corner Obama was in earlier. Witness Mitt Romney saying that the economy is "coming back," and then trying to claim that, because of Obama's policies, it came back slower and weaker than it should have. The way he puts it (“Almost everything [Obama]’s done has made it harder for this economy to recover.”) is false, but it's perfectly true that the Obama Administration has not pursued an optimal strategy to foster recovery, and that it has failed to do so from Day One, when it called for woefully inadequate stimulus and pretended that it was just the right amount.

But look at what's happened. Whereas Obama was saying, "sure, the economy is lousy but if it weren't for me it would be much worse," Romney is now saying, "sure, the economy is recovering but if it weren't for him it would be much better." If Obama had a tough sell then, Romney has an equally tough sell now. And since he was already fighting an uphill battle on all the other fronts, because people really do prefer Democratic policies to Republican ones right now and because he's so laughably less personally likeable than Obama, it's really hard to see how he wins if the economy keeps getting steadily better and he has no better way to spin the recovery than, well, it should be going stronger. I continue to think that, if the world doesn't get substantially worse on a macro level between now and November, it's going to be tricky for Obama to lose.

Obama's Speech

Was awesome. That's not much of a surprise; his speeches are usually awesome, and this one, which was set up as Obama playing offense and making a big, bold proposal, was primed to be especially so. My attitude going into the speech was that, whatever Obama himself might say to the contrary, this was entirely political grandstanding, the fulcrum of his Clinton-to-Truman pivot. As a purely political speech, I thought it was great. He made his proposal, he spent a lot of time hammering home the message that these are sensible ideas to help people, and he included a bit of conditional pounding. As in, he said to the Republicans, "you guys are f@cking nuts if you don't pass this," which sets him up to respond to their not passing it by saying simply, "you guys are f@cking nuts." As I've said to some people over the past couple of days being back at school, if Obama does not start making this pivot, and hard, after Republicans inevitably refuse to pass any component of this plan, then I'm going to start getting very disillusioned with him very quickly.

However, events of the past twelve-or-so hours have got me thinking that maybe it isn't as inevitable as it might be. Republicans, including not just Mr. Oh-Please-Can't-I-Make-A-Deal Boehner but also Mr. Oh-No-You-Most-Certainly-Cannot Cantor, are talking in terms of finding common ground and looking for elements of Obama's proposals that they can agree on. That surprises me. In particular, it doesn't feel like they're setting themselves up very well for total refusal down the line. I hope Obama can use the Republicans' refusal, if it comes, as a sledgehammer to crush them with, and in particular as a tool to get people to blame them and not him for general world-suckitude come November '12, but I would much prefer to that scenario of embracing economic failure and trying to pin the blame on his opponents a world in which we can actually make the world better. So if they'll let him pass some of this plan, then great! What Obama most definitely should not do, however, is engage in bargaining with them. If they'll let him pass all the plan, then pass all the plan. If they'll let him pass some of the plan, then pass some of the plan. But don't get into trading specific spending cuts for this plan. The American Jobs Act (an unsurpassable name, for what it's worth!) includes a provision "paying for" itself by instructing the supercommittee to make additional deficit reductions that pay for it. That's all the offsetting you need. If Republicans aren't okay with that, then they can bugger off, and we go back to the original plan of hammering their asses for obstructionism and economic sabotage. Don't get bogged down, and it'll be hard to mess this up.