Skeptical of Obama's Stimulus Plan
By Jonah GoldbergBarack Obama has a curious definition of “non-ideological.” He’s insisting on bipartisan support for a stimulus package that will cost more than anything Uncle Sam has ever bought, save perhaps for victory over the Axis powers. He says he wants “to put good ideas ahead of the old ideological battles” and doesn’t care whether they come from Republicans or Democrats. But he also says that “only government” can pull us out of this crisis.
It’s like Henry Ford’s line that you could buy any color car you wanted, as long as you wanted black. Obama is interested in any idea, as long as its peddler starts from the same “non-ideological” assumption that government experts know best.
In fairness to Obama, there is a huge consensus around the notion that government must do, well, something — something big. Conservative economists such as Harvard’s Martin Feldstein support a stimulus package. Heck, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell passes for a fiscal conservative these days because he opposes any bill of more than $1 trillion.
It’s the consensus that scares me. Chin-stroking moderates and passionate centrists often glorify consensus to the point where they sound like it’s better to be wrong in a group than to be right alone — an example of ideological dogmatism as bad as any.
Obviously, consensus can be good. But it also can lead to dangerous groupthink. Everyone knew that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Everyone at 60 Minutes knew those memos about George W. Bush and the Texas Air National Guard had to be right. Everyone knows everything is right, until everything goes wrong. If that’s not one of the great lessons of the financial collapse of 2008, I don’t know what is.
Last fall, the smartocracy said the Treasury Department had to be given $700 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program because the government had to buy all that bad paper right away. Since then, Treasury has bought no toxic assets, done nothing to help with foreclosures and, a congressional report released Friday revealed, can’t adequately explain what it did with the first $350 billion.
The current climate reminds former Freddie Mac economist Arnold Kling of the battle of the Somme in World War I (a war everyone knew would be over in six months). “Having experienced nothing but failure using offensive tactics up to that point, the Allies decided that what they needed to try was ... a really big offensive,” Kling writes. “My guess is that in 1916, anyone who doubted his own ability to direct an enormous offensive involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would never have made it to general. Similarly, today, anyone who doubts the ability of a handful of technocrats to sensibly allocate $800 billion would never make it into government or the mainstream media.”
That might overstate it a bit, because some naysayers can be heard. Economist Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute notes that whatever the benefits of the proposed stimulus, they probably don’t outweigh the enormous costs of the debt we would incur. As a result of the stimulus, the deficit this year would equal the total cost of the federal government in 2000. That’s on top of $7.76 trillion in bailouts pledged by the government, according to Bloomberg.com.
The real reason the stimulus package will be gigantic is not that the smartest people with the best ideas say it needs to be. It’s that Obama’s real priority is to get the bill out as quickly as possible, which means every constituency gets something, including Republicans. Indeed, Republicans are a priority because if he can bribe them into supporting the bill, that might prevent them from campaigning against it in 2010 if it proves ineffective or counterproductive. Hence Obama’s proposed billions in tax breaks for corporate welfare addicts and the lobbyists who love them. Democrats are justly skeptical about a tax break for a company that decides not to lay off its workers.
The GOP is right to question this “shovel-ready” infrastructure “investment.” From World War II to the early 1990s, according to economist Bruce Bartlett, not a single stimulus bill succeeded at moderating the recession it was aimed at, while many bills helped invite the next recession. Bartlett supports a stimulus in theory (as do I); he merely notes that the political process tends to be just that — a political process — and it produces political results.
The best stimulus might be to trim — or temporarily eliminate — the payroll tax. That would put money in the hands of the people who need it — and know best how to spend it. But that would be “too ideological” because it rejects the assumption that government knows best, and it would reward taxpayers, not politicians.
Audio, Video of Ryan Frederick Police Interviews Taken Shortly After Deadly Raid
Audio, Video of Ryan Frederick Police Interviews Taken Shortly After Deadly Raid
Ryan Frederick is the 28-year-old Chesapeake, Virginia man facing murder charges for killing a police officer during a drug raid (see this wiki for more on Frederick's case). My prior coverage of his trial here.
I'll put up a series of posts today and tomorrow wrapping up the testimony portion of his trial. Closing arguments are on Monday.
For now, check out these two interviews with Frederick that were played in court last week. One is only audio of an interview taken a half hour after the raid. The other is video of an interview done a few hours later.
The prosecution fought like hell to keep these interviews from being admitted into evidence. And with good reason. They're damning to the state's case. The prosecution, remember, said in its opening statement that Frederick was "stoned out of his mind" and "in a blind rage" the night of the raid. The prosecution then elicited testimony from police informant Steven Wright and jailhouse informants Jamal Skeeter (who has since been thoroughly discredited) and Lamont Malone that portrayed Frederick as a cold, calculating killer, who was boasting to fellow inmates about bringing down a cop, and even disparaging Det. Jarrod Shivers' widow.
In the videos below, a frightened, repentant Frederick weeps and shakes. At one point, he vomits after contemplating that he'd just taken a life. According to the Virginian-Pilot, in one portion of the video not depicted here, Frederick "curled himself up into a ball and cried" when the detectives left him in the room alone. The audio interview in particular is incredibly wrenching.
It's worth panning back a bit here, and restating what caused all of this. Det. Jarrod Shivers his dead, his wife is widowed, and his kids are without a father. Ryan Frederick, a man who had no prior record, and had a good job and a fiancee, has had to spend 23 of 24 hours every day for the last year locked up in a jail cell, and may spend the rest of his life in prison, because he mistakenly thought the people invading his home were criminal intruders who had come to kill him. This all happened because the police got word from a shady informant with felony charges pending against him that Frederick was growing a harmless plant in his garage. What an incredible waste.
Obama vs Odierno
Obama vs Odierno
The institutional pushback against Obama's attempt to change Iraq policy is unfolding as predicted. After a steady stream of Washington Post and Wall Street Journal editorials warning against withdrawing troops from Iraq, the New York Times today reports on the jockeying between the military and the Obama administration. According to the Times, Gen. Ray Odierno said Wednesday that "it might take the rest of the year to determine exactly when United States forces could be drawn down significantly" while J.D. Crouch warned ominously that "they don’t want to alienate the military." The Obama administration should resist this inertia -- and the public challenge to his authority -- and stick to its stated goals of drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq.
Some of this is simply the press manufacturing conflict. Odierno's public comments are consistent with those of departing Amb. Ryan Crocker -- and less novel than the reporting might suggest. This was Odierno's position before the transition, and since Obama is still in listening mode he has not yet issued new orders. Gen. Petraeus's CENTCOM hasn't yet released its JSAT strategic review. The only statement from the administration quoted in the article is by Robert Gibbs, who says "We’re no longer involved in a debate about whether, but how and when." The only thing new in Odierno's endorsement of the Council on Foreign Relations/Brookings "go slow" strategy is that he's once again going public. But it's still extremely important -- Odierno has to know that such a public statement will be received as an open military challenge to presidential authority.
The politics of this aside, I think that Odierno's intention of keeping troops in Iraq through the national elections is dangerously wrong. The CFR/Brookings/Odierno "go slow" approach ignores the reality of the new Status of Forces Agreement and the impending referendum this summer -- which may well fail if there is no sign of departing American troops. It sends the wrong messages to Iraqi politicians and the Iraqi population. It would badly hurt Obama's credibility in the region and with Iraqis, who will see his most important public commitment fall by the wayside. And it would lose the unique window of opportunity offered by the transition to signal real change.
This strategy is also a recipe for endless delay. Given the very catalog of Iraqi political fissures and emerging conflicts that Odierno cites as reason to stay, there is little reason to think that conditions will be so much more stable at the end of this proposed year of caution. At that point the exact same conversation will ensue about why drawdowns are imprudent at this time -- and does anybody believe that the people currently calling for prudence and high troop levels will suddenly reverse themselves a year from now when conditions look much the same as they do now?
And it isn't just a year: senior Iraqi officials have suggested that the national elections, which Odierno suggests as the point when drawdowns might begin, may well not be held until March 2010. I don't think that 16 months is a sacred number. But what Odierno is proposing is no significant drawdowns for 14 months, followed by another period of wrangling. This could ironically make the "rush for the exits" that everyone wants to avoid more rather than less likely -- whether or not it leads to the failure of the SOFA referendum.
The strategy that I've recommended bridges these gaps, and avoids the need for a battle between Obama and the military. A "down payment" of a public, significant drawdown in the early spring would send the correct signals to all relevant actors, while allowing plenty of time for commanders in the field to assess the impact and adjust accordingly. I hope that Obama is able to head off a battle with the military -- and the military, a battle with Obama -- by working together on such a strategy. Remember: Obama won the election.
It doesn't surprise me that a commander in the field would ask for more troops, or want to postpone drawing down troops. Why would a commander in the field want less to work with? But the job of a president, as Obama well knows, is to balance competing commitments and to make these choices.
The stimulus fight reminds me of Iraq
The stimulus fight reminds me of Iraq
By Peter Feaver
President Obama has been earnestly talking the talk of bipartisanship and walked the walk all the way to an extended closed-door session with Congressional Republicans. He even invited the Republicans to a White House cocktail party, and it is not the traditional DC party season (change we can all drink to?). Of course, Republicans needed a drink or two to drown their sorrows since the ultra-partisan Democratic leadership on the Hill rammed the stimulus package through without due consideration of Republican concerns and so got zero (that's right, zero) Republican votes as a result. (Can you think of the last time one political party by itself spent $900 billion?)
The apparent disconnect between cross-party outreach and one-party outcome is an all-too-familiar story in Washington and it reminded me of our abortive efforts to rebuild bipartisan support for seeing the Iraq war through to a successful conclusion.
Throughout 2005, we saw political support for the Iraq war erode, and with the erosion of support in DC came a drop in general public support (the causal arrow went in both directions, I know, but for the purposes of this post I think it is useful to look at how political leaders can drive down public support for a venture). This was happening even though we were largely pursuing the Iraq strategy that most Democrats and other critics wanted us to pursue. They masked this fact by falsely claiming that we had no strategy, but when you looked at the substance of what they recommended, it bore an eerie similarity to our actual Iraq policy.
The Bush White House response was to release the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq which explained the strategy, and to accompany it with a series of major speeches explaining the logic to the American people. We also did extensive outreach to Democrats on the Hill, along with private meetings with Democratic national security experts. We even invited back to the White House every living Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.
We moved public opinion slightly, but the results did not last. Over 2006, we pursued our bipartisan "strategy for vicoty," but without the benefit of any bipartisanship or bipartisan support. On the contrary, the Democrats relentlessly campaigned against our Iraq effort in vivid partisan terms and won back control of Congress partly as a result. And over the course of course of 2006, it became increasingly clear that this Iraq strategy was failing.
The Bush response was to change the strategy dramatically -- what became known as the surge strategy. This time, the strategy was not what most Democrats wanted us to pursue, so perhaps it is not surprising that we received no bipartisan support. On the contrary, we spent 2007 defending the strategy against a vigorous effort by Congressional Democrats to hobble the surge with their "slow bleed" strategy. This time, however, the Iraq strategy turned out to be the right one, and it was dramatically vindicated by events on the ground.
So, to recap: from 2005-06, we pursued a bipartisan Iraq strategy and tried to build bipartisan support for it, and both the strategy and our bipartisan outreach failed. From 2007-08, we pursued a one-party Iraq strategy and, despite strenuous efforts, built no bipartisan support -- and yet that strategy worked in the end.
I shrink from embracing the obvious parallelism: that because the Democrats played Iraq for partisan advantage, that must be what Republicans are doing now on the stimulus package. I find Republican concerns about the stimulus plan reasonable and I see no evidence that the House bill took those concerns seriously (certainly not as seriously as we took critiques of our Iraq strategy).
And I also shrink from embracing the obvious conclusion: that results always trump bipartisanship. My colleagues used to tease me that my fruitless pursuit of bipartisan support for the Iraq project reminded them of Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick. I still in my heart believe that it was the right thing to do to try to build cross-party support.
I guess the only bottom line I will draw is this: if Obama-Reid-Pelosi continue on the path they are going, they will find themselves out on a limb. They better hope that the stimulus package has the success of the surge, and not the desultory results of the "strategy for victory." Otherwise, they may find that partisan outcomes in DC lead to fragile public support for fraught policies.
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