Well, since you asked…

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

What could President Obama have done differently about the economy? Where would the 60 votes magically come from? "Critics don’t know how a bill becomes a law."

There's no use crying over spilled milk, but on the off chance we find ourselves in a similar circumstance someday let’s climb into the way-back machine and go to the distant past of January 2009. The US economy had just collapsed… like collapsed. Worst demand shock since at least the 1930s. People were frightened. It was a crisis.

The Obama administration decided to let congress figure it out and never proposed any comprehensive plan that could plausibly have done much to repair things. The incoming administration didn’t want to get its hands dirty and for God knows what reason believed utterly ridiculous administration projections of the economic situation.

But let’s pretend the administration had some concept of the economic situation. Even so, were there alternatives?

An alternative would have been to collect all the congressional Dems together and say, “Here is what we are going to do…”

2 trillion dollars, fed into the economy in whatever is the fastest and most directly stimulative method possible.

Some in the Dem caucus would have said, “That’s too much! My district won’t go for that!”

To which the President replies, “This is a national crisis. Our future is at stake and we need to get behind something that will work, not something that you think will get you re-elected. If I allow you to hamper this needed program then you will be running for re-election with 10% unemployment in your district and you will lose.”

“But more to the point, if you are worried about your re-election then I’ll give you something to worry about. Anyone in this caucus who is not 100% on board, I will call you out in a national address next week, by name, as an enemy of our economic recovery. And I will raise money for a primary challenger and I will campaign against you. And I will let every big donor know that if they give you a penny they are persona non grata in my White House.”

“And when the Republicans try to filibuster this in the Senate I will call them out and name names. These are the people who are your enemy. These are the people who want to feed your money to Wall Street while you lose your job and your house and your dreams of a college education. I will have a million people surrounding the capitol screaming to pass this thing and we will see how the Republican senators from blue states feel about their re-election chances.”

“Are we clear?”

That is one thing an immensely popular (for a few weeks or months at least) incoming President who just won an Electoral College landslide a few weeks earlier might have done in the midst of a terrifying crisis.

Since you asked…

And no, this is not 20-20 hind-sight. This is the sort of approach that a lot of folks recognized at the time to be needed.

[FiveGoodMen]

1. K&R

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

4. Thanks.

[snot]

2. Yes; and he might have known this if he'd apptd those who had been WARNING of the meltdown

instead of those who engineered it.

[FiveGoodMen]

3. And he surely WAS aware of the role that those he appointed had played in the meltdown

So, it seems he went looking for bad advice deliberately.

American people: Obama's just not that into you.

[bvar22]

5. K&R

"Strong and successful presidents (meaning those who get what they want - whether that happens to be good for the country or not) do not accept "the best deal on the table". They take out their carpentry tools and the build the goddam piece of furniture themselves. Strong and successful presidents do not get dictated to by the political environment. They reshape the environment into one that is conducive to their political aspirations."

"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for,
at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them."
--- Paul Wellstone