A History of President Obama’s 8 Years in Office

NY Magazine has a nice infographic, A History of President Obama’s 8 Years in Office "In this issue, we’ve tried to create an inventory of those years and to think a bit about how they might look from the distance of history. (That is, how will millennials remember the era in which they were so casually mocked, even as they remade the world with social media and an easy openness about gender?) Thankfully, we’ve had some help in putting together our time capsule, including from the president, who sat down in August with Jonathan Chait to discuss some critical moments of his tenure."

US analysts knew Afghan site was hospital

A few weeks ago, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner bombed the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Seriously, as I wrote, US Airstrike Hits Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan. It's still a controversy and I agree with Doctors Without Borders that an investigation by a third party is needed, as the US's story keeps changing.

Today, the AP reported US analysts knew Afghan site was hospital "American special operations analysts were gathering intelligence on an Afghan hospital days before it was destroyed by a U.S. military attack because they believed it was being used by a Pakistani operative to coordinate Taliban activity, The Associated Press has learned."

Combine this with todays reported leak on the drone program by The Intercept and things don't look good for Obama.

The Iran Deal

As usual, Vox has a lot of information on the deal, The Iran nuclear deal: everything you need to know. Max Fisher describes, The Iran nuclear deal, translated into plain English. Here is my formulation of the bullet points:

• Iran currently has 20,000 centrifuges and will have to get down to 7,000 older models
• Iran will be allowed to enrich uranium to only to 3.67%, way less than the 90% needed for a bomb
• Iran will be required to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium from 10,000 kg to 300 kg.
• Iran fulfills initial commitments by Oct, IAEA inspects by Dec, and only then do sanctions start to be lifted
• A panel of 7 nations plus the EU votes periodically on if Iran is complying, the US has a veto
• Formerly secret sites Natanz and Fordow can be used, but only Natanz for enrichment. Fordow only for research.
• Arak will be rebuilt to only make energy grade plutonium.
• IAEA inspectors will have full access to Iran's nuclear sites, uranium mines and mills, centrifuge factories, and supply chains and managed access to certain military sites. It will monitor dual-use technologies. It can access "suspicious sites."

The Iran nuclear deal, explained in fewer than 500 words is also really good. The Guardian has their own description of the deal complete with bullet points, Iran nuclear deal: world powers reach historic agreement to lift sanctions. Wonkblog has 13 charts and maps that make the Iran deal a little easier to understand

Monkey Cage points out, The Iran deal reflects the U.S.’s overwhelming power over the world’s financial system. Apparently the deal will limit international sanctions, US secondary sanctions, but not US primary sanctions.

The sanctions program against Iran was supported by the United Nations. The U.S. engaged in an extended diplomatic effort to get the UN Security Council to sign up to extensive sanctions against Iran. It also succeeded in getting the European Union to impose tougher sanctions against Iran, to the chagrin of European energy companies.

However, the willingness of the U.S. to impose “secondary sanctions” against non-U.S. firms that did business with Iran was arguably just as important. In a series of actions, the U.S. has imposed hundreds of millions of dollars in fines on financial institutions dealing with Iran. The European Union also required SWIFT–a key intermediary in all financial transactions–to cut Iranian financial institutions out of its system. Together, these steps effectively froze the Iranian economy out of the world financial system.

Glenn Greenwald of course presents the Iranians' View of the Nuclear Deal: Optimistic, With Significant Caveats. "The optimistic Iranian view is grounded in the expectation that the deal will usher in a normalization of relations between Iran and the west, lifting both the sanctions regime and the threat of war."

"Expectations among ordinary Iranians are very high: they expect substantial economic improvement, and if that fails to materialize, [Hooshang] Amirahmadi sees a likelihood of serious political instability which 'could go in a terrible direction for Iran.'"

Ezra Klein talked with Ian Bremmer on why the Iran deal is about much more than nuclear weapons. While he thinks there will be some compliance issues to resolve, he thinks it's better than no deal because the current sanctions would have eroded and our threat of war with Iran was weakening (because who wants that?) and because the Russians, Chinese and Europeans wanted an even softer deal. Also there are two aspects that for political reasons the administration can't come out and talk about. The extra oil will bring down prices and hurt OPEC which is good, and a stronger Iranian economy participating on the world stage might hurt the Iranian regime.

Regarding oil prices, Ed Kilgore refers to a WSJ article and points out Iranian Oil Will Undercut Prices. "Yes, as sanctions are lifted against Iran its oil production for export will resume (they were cut in half when sanctions were first imposed), and what is already a global market surplus will get larger, undercutting prices." So that's bad for oil companies and good for everyone else. Vox has more details on how quickly (or rather slowly) this might happen, What the Iran nuclear deal means for oil prices.

Zack Beauchamp found 2 tweets that explain the real debate over the Iran deal. "So that's the debate. Deal supporters think the deal, as is, is the only realistic alternative to war or a nuclear-capable Iran; opponents think the deal makes a nuclear Iran more likely and that war is a preferable alternative. This is a debate about the big pictures, not the details."

To put the anti-deal side in perspective, as Bremmer said, after Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, war Iran is obviously less desirable for the US and a harder sell, so it's less of a deterrent. With the international coalition weakening in their support of sanctions, we had fewer and fewer options. The Economist had this chart which really put the effect of Stuxnet on their centrifuges in perspective.

As for conservative opposition to this deal, Matthew Yglesias points out Conservatives have opposed every diplomatic breakthrough for decades. As an example he shows a 1988 conservative ad that compared Ronald Reagan to Neville Chamberlain regarding the INF treat with Gorbachev! He points out many examples to make this point, "Conservatives don't believe in talking to your enemies."

Ed Kilgore points to Two Takes on the Iran Deal.

This seems like a great analysis of options and why Republicans hate this deal. Why Republicans Are So Mad About Obama's Nuclear Deal With Iran.

Kevin Drum suggests wisely, Maybe We Should All Read the Iran Deal Before We Take a Stand On It. "In the meantime, it looks like a decent agreement to me after a first look at the deal outline—certainly better than doing nothing and letting Iran build a bomb whenever it wants, anyway. But I'll wait to see what nuclear experts have to say before I go any further. A few days won't kill me." I'm in the same boat, though from what I remember from nuclear experts a few months ago, the inspection regime is way better than they were expecting.

Barack Obama FULL SPEECH 2015 White House Correspondents Association Dinner

Obama's foreign policy isn't very exciting, but it is working

Matthew Yglesias makes the case that Obama's foreign policy isn't very exciting, but it is working

"In Ukraine, for example, Obama has not opted for the path of maximum punishment for Russia. He has opted instead for the path of punishing Russia as hard as possible at minimum cost to the United States. Russians are paying a higher price for the conflict than are Europeans, and Americans are paying a lower price still. Putin hasn't had a change of heart, but Ukrainian forces are steadily advancing on rebel-held territory and Russia is becoming more and more of a pariah. Steady gains at minimal cost don't make for great speeches, but they do put American influence on a sustainable basis."

"Israel is more secure than ever. Not just beneath its Iron Dome but because Hamas has been cut off from Iranian patronage, and Hezbollah is too busy fighting the Assad regime's enemies in Syria to open a northern front against the Jewish State. The Syrian civil war itself is a humanitarian disaster. But in a war between a vicious government and a rebel cause full of its own vicious jihadis, a brutal stalemate that sucks up resources is an acceptable outcome for the United States. The damage of the war, though real, has little direct impact on America and the costs of attempting to dive in and resolve the situation would have been prohibitive."

"In the Persian Gulf, key US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are perfectly secure from external aggression, pumping oil in peace even as the progress of solar power and fracking reduces our long-term dependence on these questionable regimes."

"The Kurdistan regional government is friendly to the United States, is viewed as legitimate by the Kurdish population, and has demonstrated considerable fighting skill in the past. A relatively small amount of American military assistance should be able to secure their continued autonomy, a useful and humane objective that is achievable at low cost. For the Iraqi government to entirely reconquer its lost Sunni hinterland, by contrast, would be considerably more difficult. It is also not entirely clear what the point would be, in terms of concrete American interests. It's far from obvious that a strong unitary Iraqi state is in the interests of the United States or reflects the desire of the Iraqi people."

"As in Syria, stalemate between Sunni-held and Shiite-held territories could be ugly — but an acceptable form of ugly. Don't expect to hear it in a Rose Garden speech, but the main oil fields are down south near Basra in firmly government-held territory."

"Meanwhile, democracy marches on. The Arab Spring has mostly been a disappointment, but the new regime in Tunisia is real enough. Indonesia is poised for its first peaceful, orderly, transition of power to an opposition presidential candidate. China is friendless in East Asia. 'We'll do what we can, when we can do something useful on the cheap' doesn't quite have the glorious ring of JFK's vow to 'pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship.' But it does have the advantage of being a sustainable, sensible approach to 21st century world affairs."

Bacevich Has Questions for President Obama

Andrew Bacevich has Questions for President Obama -- Before He Pulls the Trigger on Syria

First, why does this particular heinous act rise to the level of justifying a military response? More specifically, why did a similarly heinous act by the Egyptian army elicit from Washington only the mildest response? Just weeks ago, Egyptian security forces slaughtered hundreds of Egyptians whose ‘crime’ was to protest a military coup that overthrew a legitimately elected president. Why the double standard?

Second, once U.S. military action against Syria begins, when will it end? What is the political objective? Wrapping the Assad regime on the knuckles is unlikely to persuade it to change its ways. That regime is engaged in a fight for survival. So what exactly does the United States intend to achieve and how much is President Obama willing to spend in lives and treasure to get there? War is a risky business. Is the president willing to commit U.S. forces to what could well become another protracted and costly struggle?

Third, what is the legal basis for military action? Neither Russia nor China is likely to agree to an attack on Syria, so authorization by the U.N. Security Council won’t be forthcoming. Will Obama ask Congress for the authority to act? Or will he, as so many of his recent predecessors have done, employ some dodge to circumvent the Constitution? With what justification?

Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin

I just read Obama's statement today, Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin. It's good and worth a read.

"There are very few African American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store.  That includes me.  There are very few African American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.  That happens to me -- at least before I was a senator.  There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.  That happens often.

And I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.  And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.  The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws -- everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws.  And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case."

I do think there's a disconnect between someone who can say this, "And the fact that a lot of African American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African American boys are more violent -- using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain." and also consider nominating NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly (of stop and frisk fame) to head the Department of Homeland Security.

I also agree with Experiences and History by Ed Kilgore "Not being African-American or a conservative, Obama’s statement struck me as squarely identifying what’s wrong with the Supreme Court decision in the Shelby County v. Holder case, what’s wrong with claims that affirmative action is useless and morally tainted, and what’s wrong with the belief that with slavery and Jim Crow gone, the only genuine civil rights cause is to protect white people from the injustice of continued African-American grievances. People still alive remember Jim Crow. Still more know something about history. And anyone paying attention understands the connection between those ‘experiences and history’ and contemporary phenomena ranging from mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, to ‘Stand Your Ground’ and concealed-carry laws, to attacks on ‘looters’ and ‘parasites,’ and to the undermining of public schools and the social safety net."

Obama on Climate Change

Earlier this week Obama gave a big speech on Climate Change. I missed it and haven't had time to catch up with this. The video and text is here, Obama: 'We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society'.

What moron scheduled this speech for last week of Supreme Court decisions, when all the big ones are released. From what I understand he's going to do what he can via the executive branch and ignore Congress. Maybe it was deliberate so that people wouldn't notice, in which case, why give a speech?

Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily

The Guardian reports Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily "The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an 'ongoing, daily basis' to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered."

Holder: We Droned 3 of 4 Americans By Accident. Oops.

Danger Room writes Holder: We Droned 3 of 4 Americans By Accident. Oops..

"In an extraordinary admission, Attorney General Eric Holder has told Congress that U.S. drone strikes since 2009 have killed four Americans — three of whom were ‘not specifically targeted.’

For all the effort that the Obama administration has gone to in asserting that its drones only kill the people that the administration intends to kill, Holder wrote in a letter today to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that Samir Khan, 16-year old Abdulrahman Awlaki and Jude Kenan Mohammad were ‘not specifically targeted by the United States.’ The fourth American to die in a drone strike since 2009 was Abdulrahman’s father Anwar Awlaki, a radical propagandist whom the U.S. killed in Yemen in 2011.

The five page letter, obtained and published by Charlie Savage of The New York Times, does not explain the circumstances that led to the unintentional killings of Khan, Mohammad and the younger Awlaki. Holder does not apologize for the killings, nor explain whether their deaths resulted from errant targeting, mistaken identity or another circumstance."

It's not really the drones I mind, it's the extra-judicial use. If a cop accidentally a civilian there's an investigation. That's the case if they do it as an accident while chasing a suspect or if they do it as cold blooded murder. The investigation is how we figure out which it was. Clearly being on a battlefield during a war is different, but we do investigate when US soldiers are accused of killing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and we certainly would if they were accused of killing a US citizen. Using a drone should be no different than "using" a soldier and there needs to be due process to target a US citizen.

Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address in graphs

Wonkblog does a great job with Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address in graphs.

Barack Obama is Not Pleased

This interview with Obama from the new The New Republic was pretty good Barack Obama is Not Pleased.

Inauguration Tidbits

US presidential inauguration speeches: how does Obama's second compare? "Barack Obama has made his second presidential inauguration speech. But how does it compare to previous presidents? Santiago Ortiz has create this guide to every inauguration speech since Richard Nixon became president in 1969. Roll over a word to see which are closely connected to it, search in the box on the right an filter the most common words below."

The alliteration of Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall got some coverage. A Map of Human Dignity is a good primer if you don't know all the places (I didn't). Krugman has a little more.

But of course the really important question is Why Antonin Scalia Is Wearing That Hat to Inauguration which The Atlantic Wire covers in detail.

President Obama takes the oath ...

The White House tweeted this, President Obama takes the oath of office during the Inaugural swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Capitol and included this picture. Notice his mother-in-law on the right...



They also posted The Second Inauguration of Barack Obama with a transcript and video.

Obama: The first meme president

Obama: The first meme president.

"The four years that Obama has served in the White House coincided with an explosion in Internet memes — Photoshopped images that are passed around via email, blogs, Twitter and Facebook and popularized on sites such as Reddit and Tumblr.

Here's a history of the first meme president, as told through seven major memes: the hope poster, Superman, the teleprompter, Spock, the Joker, the Jedi knight and 'not bad.'"

I've only seen a few of these, and I think I'm happy about that.

Obama's Numbers

"Here — in a graphic suitable for framing, embossing, emailing to friends or posting on social media — is an accurate statistical picture of key changes that occurred since Obama took office in January 2009. The indicators are all derived from the most authoritative and up-to-date sources available."

Obama Needs to Get a Message

I heard today how it wasn't a great week for Obama. The economy isn't doing well, Scott Walker won his recall election in Wisconsin, Romney raised more money than he did in May, Bill Clinton and Ed Rendell went off message and needed to apologize.

Whatever.

I think the problem is that so far, Obama has no message for this campaign. Now maybe it's not easy to come up with one, but that's the job. I know what the Republicans are for and to me it's crazy. They want to lower taxes, destroy all government programs except for the military, and revert progress on social issue 50 years. And they think this will help the economy but I'm sure it won't.

What's Obama's plan? Is he for more stimulus? I haven't heard that. He wants to extend the Bush tax cuts on those making under $250,000 or under $1 million, I'm not sure which, while letting them expire for those making more. That's fine, but it won't do much. I still can't figure out if Dodd-Frank actually regulates wall street or allows derivates to be regulated at all. I know that Obamacare will kick in any year now if the Supreme Court doesn't pull it at the end of the month. I also know he spends time in meetings figuring out which individuals on the side of the planet to kill, even if they're American citizens. And he's not mentioned the climate at all.

He needs to take a stand. He needs to say what's he for and explain how the Republicans are blocking things using unprecedented power grabs. I think he believes the problems with the economy are on the demand side and we need the government to be the spender of last resort, at least I hope so. And I wish he would be pursuing legislation to make that happen and pointing out when Republicans block that and not just spending time compromising all his positions and then taking the blame for the failures. Sure, compromise to get stuff passed, but ensure that what gets passed is what you want to take responsibility for.

Without that we get crap like this:

Obama Backs Away From ‘Fine’ Comment. He got pounced on for saying the private sector is fine. Well that's mostly true as most unemployment is from the public sector because we keep laying off teachers and police. Maybe we should stop that.

Bill Clinton apologizes for Bush tax cuts comments. Clinton said the Bush tax cuts should be extended and apparently Obama opposes that. I think we're now arguing about only on the wealthy, but why isn't this clear? We've only been debating this for a couple of years now.

Ed Rendell: Obama ‘hurt by being a legislator only’ before presidency. Rendell said when Obama started he was a weak executive and regarding significant legislation “too much of it was left up to the Congress”. Now I'm sure no one is prepared when they first become president and I'm also sure that leaving things, particularly healthcare, up to the Congress was deliberate because they didn't want to repeat Hilary's mistake in the 90s. But fine, claim it already. Say he tried to work with Congress but they aren't cooperating, here's exactly what he wants to see happen and let them describe something different if they want.

Now we're seeing crap like this in the New York Times, Lobby E-Mails Show Depth of Obama Ties to Drug Industry. As if it's news that Obama conceded reimportation to get big pharma's support. But now Republican's are jumping on it and at least the times quote Robert Reich having to say: " “Republicans trumpeting these e-mails is like a fox complaining someone else raided the chicken coop,” said Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. “Sad to say, it’s called politics in an era when big corporations have an effective veto over major legislation affecting them and when the G.O.P. is usually the beneficiary. In this instance, the G.O.P. was outfoxed. Who are they to complain?”"

Now I get emails from the Obama campaign that say, Romney raised more money than us, "If you just want to cut to the chase, you can donate to Barack Obama now." Seriously? You're not even going to pretend to stand for something?

Both Obama and the Democratic National Committee avoided the recall election. There had to be a petition to get the DNC to spend money on the recall. Obama apparently wanted to stay above the fray. And what a surprise big money won.

Robert Scheer wrote Democrats Failed in Wisconsin Because They Failed Wisconsin.

"Of course [the GOP] argument is a red herring. The budget crises of state and municipal governments were not brought on by excessive pay to firemen, cops and other civil servants, but rather by a banking meltdown that has enriched those who engineered it. Housing values, and the local taxes dependent on them, are down because of financial shenanigans that wrapped mortgages into collateralized debt obligations, and that is the root cause of government red ink. But the job security and pensions of government employees make terribly convenient scapegoats at a time when so many Americans are lining up at food banks.

The electorate in Wisconsin, and San Diego and San Jose, Calif., that voted Tuesday against public employee unions were not expressing a rational response to the crisis, but rather a tantrum stoked by the lavishly financed demagogues of the right. The voters bought their story because the opportunism of the Democratic Party leadership has left progressives without a believable alternative to the tea party’s narrative. Indeed, job creation became a bigger issue than collective bargaining in the Wisconsin race, and the dismal national unemployment figures that came out just days before the election didn’t hurt the Republicans’ cause."

Now I know that June polls are pretty worthless, but Nate Silver has released his first model forecast on the election and Obama is winning by hair. "The first look at the 2012 FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast has Barack Obama as a very slight favorite to win re-election. But his advantage equates to only a two-point lead in the national popular vote, and the edge could easily swing to Mitt Romney on the basis of further bad economic news."

Seriously, it's easy to expect bad economic news in the next four months. Obama needs a clear message both he and his supporters can stick to and that voters can understand and decide on. It shouldn't be too hard and it's clear it shouldn't be about a new kind of politics in Washington. It should be about doing the right thing to fix a lot of different problems we have.

More on that later.

Chris Mattews On Obama: ‘I Don’t Understand Why He Thinks Small’

I agree. (via TPM)

What could Obama have done?

On Sunday the New York Times ran a piece If I Were President.... "Then I asked a range of Americans who don’t labor in politics or the media what they’d do if they were president." I thought it was particularly lame.

Jonathan Chait says, "If you looking for an anthropologically perfect sample of the cult of the presidency, check out the feature of the Sunday New York Times, entitled "If I Were President." The feature asks a series of leading lights to outline their vision for the country. But the entire concept makes no distinction between the notion of "if I were president" and "if I were king." If you were the president, of course, you would need a course of action that could be accomplished either through an executive order or that could be passed through both the House and Senate. The proposals generally make no allowance whatsoever for Congress."

Ezra Klein asked, What could Obama have done? "I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ways in which the past few years could have gone differently. I’ve even come up with a few. But none of them lead to dramatically better outcomes today."

"Indeed, if you had taken me aside in 2008 and sketched out the first three years of Obama’s presidency, I would have thought you were being overoptimistic: an $800 billion stimulus package — recall that people were only talking in the $200-$300 billion range back then — followed by near-universal health-care reform, followed by financial regulation, followed by another stimulus (in the 2010 tax deal), followed by the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” followed by the killing of Osama bin Laden and the apparent ousting of Moammar Gaddafi? There was no way. And yet all that did get done. But the administration hasn’t able to get unemployment under control — perhaps it couldn’t have gotten unemployment under control — and so all of that has not been nearly enough."

Matthew Yglesias came up with Imagining Better Yesterdays. "For example, back on ARRA, would it have been impossible to negotiate a deal that featured a smaller headline stimulus number but contained a payroll tax cut “trigger” mechanism if unemployment shot over 8 percent? Maybe it would have been, but it’s not obviously an objectionable idea from the point of view of the pivotal stakeholders and it just wasn’t tried. Similarly, timely nominations for Federal Reserve Board vacancies would have made a difference. The administration could have moved swiftly to nominate someone to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency who was committed to using the powers of that office to move the economy...The original sin here was not thinking seriously enough about the question 'what will we wish we’d done if 30 months from now the BEA turns out to have been underestimating the recession?'"

Klein followed up, What Obama could have done, Part II. "So you could make the argument that Matt’s policy would have been marginally better or marginally worse — I’d prefer it, actually -- but it’s hard to make the argument that it would have been dramatically different." Even on housing he can't come up with much Obama could have done. Now what Congress could have done is another story.

Brad DeLong wrote, "I think Ezra is simply wrong. There were a large number of things that Obama could have done--there are even things he could do now, if he wanted to." He lists 10 things:

1. Use Reconciliation to get a second stimulus through Congress in the fall of 2009.
2. Expand the PPIP to do $3 trillion of quantitative easing through the Treasury Department.
3. Have a real HAMP to refinance mortgages.
4. Use Fannie and Freddie to (temporarily) nationalize mortgage finance, refinance mortgages, and rebalance the housing market.
5. Announce that a weaker dollar is in America's interest.
6. Nominate a Fed Chair who takes the Fed's dual mandate seriously and pursues policies to stabilize the growth of nominal GDP.
7. Appoint Fed governors who take the Fed's dual mandate seriously and support policies to stabilize the growth of nominal GDP.
8. Take equity in the banks in January-March of 2009 and keep them from lobbying against financial reform.
9. Use Reconciliation to pass an infrastructure bank.
10. Use TARP money as a mezzanine tranche to fund large-scale additional aid to states and localities to reduce their fiscal contractions.


Kevin Drum followed that with Obama's Missed Chance. "My own guess is that #6 and #7, though desirable, probably wouldn't have made too much difference. And #1 and #9 both would have required reconciliation instructions to be written by April 2009. That was only a couple of months after the stimulus bill had passed, and at the time the House and Senate were willing to include reconciliation instructions in the budget resolution only for healthcare and education funding. Perhaps Obama should have pushed harder for open-ended instructions, but at the time the administration and Congress both thought the 2009 stimulus would be enough. Obviously that was a mistake, but broadly speaking, that was the mistake, not all the subsequent details that resulted from that original misjudgment. Still, even if my understanding of the reconciliation process is right — and I'll accept correction from anyone who's an expert — that leaves six strong ideas plus two more that would have been worthwhile even if their effect would have been modest. Not bad."

My own answer? Obama could have used the bully pulpit to to explain and support the progressive argument to the American people and to prevent virtually every policy from moving so far to the right. That might have resulted in a bigger stimulus, health care reform with a public option (though not a single payer system), Peter Diamond on the federal reserve board, Elizabeth Warren heading the CFPB, financial reform with some real teeth, and maybe less time devoted to such stupidity as deficit reduction in a recession. I'm not saying progressives would have gotten everything they wanted, but I do think that conservatives dominated the discourse, even while in the minority, and were much more effective in getting what they wanted. If Obama was making a stronger case instead of preemptively conceding, I think things could have been very different. Maybe the nation would have spent less time debating health care, birth certificates, and debt limits and maybe we could be talking about solutions to climate change that involved jobs modernizing our energy infrastructure.

Update: Klein sums up some responses in What could Obama have done, Part III

Obama's Book Club

The Daily Beast wrote Obama's Book Club. "The Reader-in-Chief is heading for the beach. Here's every book he's read since the last campaign."

It may all be chart junk, but I kinda like it.