Early in 1933, John Maynard Keynes wrote a letter to a new President named Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His straight forward suggestion was prescient. That President followed Keynes' advise. Unfortunately, our current President and his advisers were not students of history, or decided to do the exact opposite.
The President, the Democratic party, and progressives across the country are now paying the price for this fateful decision.
John Maynard Keynes in 1933...
"You are engaged on a double task, Recovery and Reform;--recovery from the slump and the passage of those business and social reforms which are long overdue. For the first, speed and quick results are essential. The second may be urgent too; but haste will be injurious, and wisdom of long-range purpose is more necessary than immediate achievement.
It will be through raising high the prestige of your administration by success in short-range Recovery, that you will have the driving force to accomplish long-range Reform. On the other hand, even wise and necessary Reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate Recovery. For it will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action, before you have had time to put other motives in their place."
Truer words have never been spoken.
Those that do not learn from history, are doomed to repeat it, or in this case, fail to repeat it.
The cart was put before the horse. We are now left as a community to argue ad nauseum over the significance of the President's reform accomplishments instead of celebrating the recovery successes. If the Keynes model was followed, I doubt the meta-wars occurring over and over again here would be occurring.
This issue was exacerbated by the fact that the activist base was ignored and demeaned from the almost the day after the election. The very fact that we are so divided here is an unequivocal demonstration that the Democratic party did not sure up their base as step one before moving to the middle. The race to middle from day one, was the single most disastrous decision the President could make. It put all of the power in the hand of his opposition while simultaneously demotivating many of his biggest potential defenders.
The fact that this site and the blogosphere in general is a debate fest is evidence. In July of 2002, were conservatives debating whether or not a President who barely was selected was actually serving their interests? Karl Rove ensured their was no doubt before heading to the middle. This is the political equivalent of Keynes argument.
I understand that the Administration and many here thought reaching out to Republicans and the center would somehow help (Lieberman, Warren, Emanuel), but I think we can all agree that this did not have the intended effect.
Unfortunately, even as this strategy became apparent, the Administration continued to double down on this failed strategy.
Now, some of this happened out of necessity -- until Al Franken and Arlen Specter joined the Democratic conference, literally everything they wanted to do was subject to filibusters. But from the outset, Democrats confronted a Republican Party that argued for tax cuts and pure, Schumpeter-style creative destruction of failing industries with... well, with what? The stimulus was a mish-mash of spending plans that sounded good and tax cuts that Republicans asked for them didn't vote for. The jobs bills were shrunk to get Republican votes, then they didn't. Democrats believed that deficit spending was the way to dig out of the recession but they apologized for it, and tried to cover it up. You had the president talking to Christina Romer about spending multipliers, then heading on to TV to say the government needed to tighten belts just like American families did.
Was it ever possible for Democrats to win this argument? No, their policies weren't going to work the way they promised, they knew it, and they picked the easy road of bashing Republicans over the hard road of trying to explain why short-term deficit spending and tax hikes down the road worked where tax cuts didn't.
It is not that they gave it the old college try. I understand the thought process and why one would head down this path. But then you have foolishness like this:
In private conversations, White House officials are contemptuous of what they see as liberal lamentations unhinged from historical context or contemporary political realities.
I am yet to figure out why people in the WH continue to take shots at the very people that could provide them with reams of support. Instead, they continue to give folks like Politico blind quotes instead of being willing to "say it to our face". They appear to be scared, petulant, and/or incompetent. The fact that they continue to try to blame the blogosphere for their failures just reinforces that.
It is the audacity to make these type of assertions that tells me the Administration will not turn around until the people who made the early political decisions and continue to work in the west wing are given the opportunity to spend more time with their families.
The real question is whether it will be too late.