In New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait has a piece called "Romney Just Making Stuff up Now." Now, no one has ever accused Chait of being a slave to the truth, but this bit of revisionist history is actually pretty funny. In the course of accusing Romney of making up the historical facts, Chait creates what is essentially a whole new world of the past.
The reason for Chait's article is Romney's speech yesterday in which he mentioned Noam Schreiber's book, The Escape Artists, and repeats the point that after the stimulus was passed in 2009, president Obama ignored the economy and concentrated on passage of Obamacare even though he knew this would make the recovery slower. Chait is apoplectic at the thought that Romney could accuse Obama of such conduct; for Chait this is just a pack of lies. But, as they say, facts are stubborn things, and Chait cannot just change them to fit his narrative.
Perhaps Chait's biggest point is that there was no way to pass a second stimulus after the first one failed. That was why Obama focused on Obamacare. Here is what Chait calls "a fair representation of respectable opinion at the time" in 2009 after the stimulus was passed. "The deficit was the central problem, and anything that made it “worse” was inherently suspect." Really? Do you recall all those Democrats who worried about the deficit in 2009 and 2010? 2010 was the year that the Tea Party blossomed. Remember the serious reception that the Tea Party got from the Democrats? You recall, don't you, how the Democrats said that the Tea Party was raising important points about excess government spending and the need to balance the budget? No? That is because Chait is just making this up as he goes along. The Tea Party was denounced by the Democrats as a bunch of racist rubes. Imagine, they told us, the nerve of these racist idiots who actually worry about the size of the deficit. "The deficit is not important" was the message coming from Obama central.
But Chait tells us that a second stimulus could never have been passed. More spending just would never have been approved. Huh? The Democrats had a 60-40 majority in the Senate and a huge majority in the House. Is there any question that had Obama focused on the economy he could have gotten another spending package passed? No rational person would think so.
But what about a filibuster. After all, once Scott Brown got elected, the Democrats only had 59-41 majority in the Senate. Those GOP senators would never let another spending bill through, right? Actually, the answer to this one is no again. Chait is just wrong. A spending bill would affect the budget and could be passed by reconciliation in the Senate (just they way the Democrats finally passed Obamacare.) That means that the bill could not be subjected to a filibuster so long as it got 51 votes. So Chait is claiming that had Obama put forward a second spending bill, he couldn't get 50 out of 59 Democrats to vote for it? (The vice president would break any tie.) Who is he kidding?
Chait also tells us that Romney is wrong because the health care reform was essentially inevitable. According to Chait, "Health-care reform was the culmination of a legislative consensus built up over years among policy wonks, elected officials, and interest groups." A consensus? Does he remember those town hall meetings with the public where the "consensus" was expressed by outraged citizens who stridently opposed the bill? Maybe the "consensus" animated the Tea Party? Was it the "consensus" that led to the bill being opposed by every single Republican in the House and Senate? It was no "consensus"; it was more like a death match.
The actual truth is that once the stimulus was passed, Obama shifted his attention away from the economy. He may have told us that jobs were the last thing he thought about in the evening and the first thing in the morning. The truth, however, is that he never thought at all about jobs. Instead, Obama concentrated on a healthcare bill that the nation did not want. He pushed cap and trade legislation that would have killed hundreds of thousands of jobs. He pushed Dodd-Frank legislation that cut way back on the ability of small and medium sized banks to make loans to small businesses. He had the EPA issue regulations that forced enormous additional costs onto manufacturers and cost thousands more jobs. He helped push through the delivery of General Motors to the UAW while putting thousands of car dealers out of business with the resulting loss of over 100,000 jobs. He curtailed drilling on federal land and all off shore drilling which helped raise the price of oil world wide, thus slowing economic growth. Never did Obama actually think about jobs after the stimulus was passed.
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