Obama’s Rookie Mistake

Note to President Obama: everyone will not like you, and the pursuit of popularity above all else– call it bi-partisanship if you want, but you’re not fooling this feminist– is a losing game. And when the nation’s very future rests in your administration’s hands, this particular fool’s errand is not funny.

You’d think someone who’s been a professor would understand the peculiar machinations of power dynamics. People like you when you give them what they want. But if you give them too much of what they want too quickly, and too freely, they have little respect for you, and managing them becomes unpleasant. Obama should have learned this lesson about likebility long ago; it’s management 101.

Rachel Maddow makes a similar point using an apt comparison between Obama’s behavior and that of women bemused by power dynamics in relationships, explaining that the Republicans Obama seeks to court are “just not that into him”:

In the name of his own likability, Obama is wasting billions of dollars, creating tax cuts with monies that could instead be used to fund infrastructure projects, in the name of courting Republican votes. We live in a crumbling superpower, a testament to the short-sighted stupidity of our previous Republican leaders. Yet Obama is willing to lend them a ready ear in fixing the very problem their ideology created in an absurd bid for a supermajority approval of his stimulus package.

And the Republicans are laughing at him. If zero Republican votes in the House for the stimulus package doesn’t teach Obama that the basic rules of power dynamics cannot be ignored, particularly in a context nakedly ruled by power grabs, then what will?

Who is going to pay the price for Obama’s newbie fumbles? Already, family planning for poor people has been tossed aside in the name of bi-partisanship. And imagine what these wasteful tax cuts might have done for people in need, and states like mine, ground zero for the housing crisis, paying bills with IOUs as the need for social services increases dramatically.

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Did you Know the New Deal Sucked?

Because that was news to me, and yesterday, I was sitting around in a Percocet-induced haze, with a hurt back, bored out of my mind, and able to do little but read short things. So I decided to check into this recent, odd right-wing theory that the New Deal was a failure. I don’t know why this seemed like a good idea when I was lying in bed slightly nauseous with one functional arm. Yesterday, like I mentioned, was hazy.

But do remember that I did find a few very interesting posts over on The Huffington Post explaining the basis of the new critique of the New Deal as a failure. Hale Stewart takes Amity Shlaes to task for her misleading statements in The Forgotten Man (2007), the book where she charges that The New Deal prolonged the Great Depression because government spending plans discouraged private investment. Here is Shlaes discussing her New Deal theories with a bemused Jonathan Alter on Talk of the Nation.

According to Stewart, the new talk about the failure of government intervention from the Right Wing is justified by the arguments of Shlaes’ book, as well as a few papers by right wing economists who work at UCLA.

Here is Paul Krugman debunking Shales’ theory as mouthed by George Will.

And, in slightly unrelated economic news, here is the best plan for economic recovery I’ve heard so far, from none other than Jon Stewart.

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