Ken’s Take: As a “get it done” aficionado, I’m intrigued by Team Obama’s inability to make anything really happen. Banks are still holding toxic assets and foreclosing, the economy is still unstimulated, etc. Their recipe: motivating rhetoric, passed legislation, a new web site, and a declaration of victory … followed by ginned up numbers that they don’t even believe. Below is a partial explanation …
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NY Times, “Vince Lombardi Politics”, David Brooks, June 30, 2009
There are two types of political pragmatism. There is legislative pragmatism — writing bills that can pass.
Then there is policy pragmatism — creating programs that work. These two pragmatisms are in tension, and in their current frame of mind, Democrats often put the former before the latter.
On the stimulus bill, the Democratic committee chairmen wrote a sprawling bill that incorporated the diverse wishes of hundreds of members and interest groups. But as they did so, the bill had less and less to do with stimulus. Only about 40 percent of the money in the bill was truly stimulative, and that money was not designed to be spent quickly.
For example, according to the Congressional Budget Office, only 11 percent of the discretionary spending in the stimulus will be disbursed by the end of the fiscal year. The bill passed, but it is not doing much to create jobs this year and it will not do nearly as much as it could to create jobs in 2010.
On cap and trade, the House chairmen took a relatively clean though politically difficult idea — auctioning off pollution permits — and they transformed it into a morass of corporate giveaways that make the stimulus bill look parsimonious. Permits would now be given to well-connected companies.
The bill passed the House, but would it actually reduce emissions? It’s impossible to know. A few years ago the European Union passed a similar cap-and-trade system, but because it was so shot through with special interest caveats, emissions actually rose.
The great paradox of the age is that Barack Obama, the most riveting of recent presidents, is leading us into an era of Congressional dominance. And Congressional governance is a haven for special interest pleading and venal logrolling.
When the executive branch is dominant you often get coherent proposals that may not pass. When Congress is dominant, as now, you get politically viable mishmashes that don’t necessarily make sense.
Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/opinion/30brooks.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
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