At the end of George W. Bush's presidency, the nation's debt is estimated to be seventy percent of GDP. How much leeway will that leave Barack Obama to propose new programs, such as national health care? If the debt rises to 110 percent of GDP in his first term -- 110 percent of GDP is the largest the debt has ever been (after World War II), I suspect he'll be politically vulnerable to a challenge in 2012 from fiscal conservatives. Steve Coll in The New Yorker:
"The Obama Administration is proceeding initially, it seems, from a
sound and firm belief that it cannot afford to be imprisoned by the
debts it has inherited, or to allow fiscal constraints alone to prevent
transformational projects in health care and energy. Ted Kennedy weighed in
on Sunday to argue that health care, in particular, can’t wait. He’s
right, of course, but his work will be harder than it should be."
"must be willing to spend at least six hundred billion dollars—a
Keynesian outpouring—on public works, health care, energy independence,
unemployment benefits, mortgage refinancing, aid to state and local
governments, and other programs. Otherwise, the country will slide into
a depression that will rival the one Roosevelt inherited. (When I ran
the six-hundred-billion figure by Paul Krugman, he agreed.)"
Obama will be restrained from such massive deficit spending by conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who tend to be deficit hawks. If Obama leads the nation to a huge, unprecedented first-term deficit, it would give Republicans a focus and a target to challenge him. And yet, Democrats will be disappointed if he's overly cautious. They believe his landslide victory gives him a mandate to be bold.
Someone asked me to briefly describe what President Clinton did for the U.S. economy. Here's my response off the top of my head:
Clinton had a relatively conservative economic policy. The conventional wisdom is that he had the wisdom not to intervene in the economy too much, to over-regulate and over-tax -- that might stymie economic growth. He realized early that reducing the federal deficit
would be crucial to hold down interest rates, free capital for the
private sector and reassure investors about long-term economic
stability. His disciplined economic plan passed by one vote in 1993.
His management of economic policy spurred growth and led to
revenue surpluses. Unemployment fell, as did the number of people in
poverty. He turned the Democrats into the party of fiscal
responsibility.
On international issues, he recognized the power of globalization to
reshape economies. He could have been a protectionist, he could have
opposed NAFTA. Indeed half the Democrats in Congress did. But he thought it was a good idea for the U.S. economy and workers for the long run.
"He Was Slick, Thank God," by James Fallows. "Bill Clinton's talent for confounding his enemies,
manipulating his friends, and playing all sides against the middle
helped to create the economic golden years."
Over the course of this campaign, I've compared Barack Obama to Adlai Stevenson in 1952, JohnKennedy in 1960, and Ronald Reagan in 1980, offering the possibilities of transformational leadership. There is also the possibility he could be another Jimmy Carter. Time will tell.
The refusal to play by the rules of Washington contributed to the Carter administration's difficult relationship
with Congress. Jordan and Frank Moore, in particular, feuded with
leading Democrats like House Speaker Tip O'Neill
from the start. Unreturned phone calls, insults (both real and
imagined), and an unwillingness to trade political favors soured many
on Capitol Hill and tangibly affected the president's ability to push
through his ambitious agenda.
"There was an innocence, and an arrogance, about the idea that you
could run the country with your Atlanta statehouse team -- you just
couldn't," concludes historian Roger Wilkins. "Every president brings
his people, but most presidents bring people who are seasoned people
who really understand Washington and know how to move around the city.
That just wasn't true of Jimmy Carter. You hate to say it, but it was
often, it seemed, very amateurish."
The Obama team needs to think long and hard about how they're going to avoid the pitfalls that befell Jimmy Carter both in the campaign -- he lost a 20-point lead -- and the presidency. Carter was never accepted by the Washington establishment, and was widely viewed as ineffectual.
I am reassured by Newsweek's report that Obama "has a much more disciplined, focused team than Kerry (or Hillary Clinton), whose
organizations were prone to infighting and lacked strong leadership." Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe, is said to be both a good strategist and a good manager (Jordan wasn't a good manager). Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, 53, is far more seasoned than Jordan or Carter's other top advisor, Jody Powell were as early thirty-somethings.
Unlike Carter, Obama doesn't micro-manage. I remember reading reports that Carter was a hard-taskmaster who stared grimly at his staff and rarely offered praise. He was more feared and respected than liked. Obama, Newsweek reports, remains liked as well as respected by his staff.
But Obama and Carter are/were largely unknown -- they had not been on the national scene long when nominated. It's both a strength and a weakness.
For some reason, YouTube.com does not pick up the audio, but Facebook does
National media hotshots say Hillary Clinton should withdraw from the presidential campaign because she faces a stiff uphill battle. But the race for the nomination is still close enough where she could pull off a surprising victory, and I bet few people in the remaining primary states want the race to end now.
My compilation of “citizen journalist” coverage of Bill
Clinton’s tour of North Carolina colleges gives a very different
perspective from what you find in the national media. After watching presidential candidates from afar or passively on
television and feeling alienated from the process, citizens are thrilled to see
a President (and presidential candidates) up close, have their own media
outlets to share their insights, videos and photos, and finally feel like they’re
a part of the process.
(UPDATE: Bill Clinton "Finds His Niche" in smalltown America, The Washington Post reports in a front-page piece datelined Lumberton, N.C. "They say Bill Clinton's been banished to the backwater, but that's not how it is," he said. "I'm from the backwater. I like it here.")
An enthusiastic crowd of at least 700 people greeted former President Bill Clinton in the small town of Laurinburg, NC on April 4, a town that has never seen a President of the United States. To the students from local elementary schools and Scotland High School as well as St. Andrews Presbyterian College who attended, this was a rare chance to feel a part of the national conversation. President Clinton was given a warm welcome, complete with bagpipes playing "Scotland Forever."
In my own experience growing up in Scotland County, the prevailing view was that national politics was far too removed and distant to feel that any president or national politician cared enough about people in small communities like ours to visit. Tens of thousands if not millions of Americans would still like to feel they are a part of the process. Let's give them (us) the chance.
President Clinton started off the day at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke in Robeson County. After his appearance at St. Andrews in Laurinburg, he went on to Wingate College outside Monroe in Union County, and then to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in Mecklenburg County.
This is the first election since 1976 (when President Ford was challenged by Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination) that North Carolina has played such a crucial role. That year, Reagan beat Ford in North Carolina and revived his campaign for the nomination.
It wasn't clear how many people in the Scotland County crowd were solid Hillary supporters or just curious to see an ex-President. My guess is that a lot of people in North Carolina are still undecided in the presidential primary race.
What's really cool is that many people who attend such events post their observations to their own blogs, their photos to Flickr.com, and their video clips to YouTube, so that we can find ourselves in others' videos and others can find themselves in our videos. This can be called "citizen journalism." I've compiled as much of the "citizen journalism" coverage of the event I can find online -- it gives a rather
different perspective from mainstream media coverage
It will be interesting to see other examples of citizen journalism as the presidential candidates scour North Carolina.
L.K. Campbell offers interesting photos and observations about the crowd at St. Andrews here.
I found this clip on YouTube by "Robertastic" -- in which Clinton responds when Obama supporters in the crowd raise a banner for Obama:
"JoaoMarcosMartella" recorded these clips of Clinton at St. Andrews and posted them on YouTube:
Afterward, President Clinton conversed with the crowd for about 15 minutes. I also found this video clip on YouTube by "JoaoMarcosMartello." President Clinton talks about what role he'd like to play in Hillary's administration:
I found this clip on YouTube from "Butterflykiskis" from Clinton's appearance at UNC-Pembroke, in which he talks about his memories of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, and of the aftermath -- he was a student at Georgetown University in Washington, DC at the time.
I found this clip on YouTube from "jtew85" from Clinton's appearance at UNC-P, in which he talks about Hillary's "interactive" campaign in North Carolina, inviting questions from citizens:
Along the same lines, Hillary Clinton has set up a special section of her web site (also at www.ncaskme.com) where NC voters can ask questions, which she'll try to answer on the campaign trail.
If you attended any of these events, what did you think? Were you persuaded by Bill Clinton's case for Hillary? Or if you know of other "citizen journalism" personal accounts of encountering the presidential candidates or their surrogates, please post the links.
On Good Friday, Daddy suggested we drive over to the Cary, NC Senior Center to see former President Bill Clinton, who was in town campaigning for Hillary Clinton to be President. I wasn't sure whether Hillary Clinton was his sister or his wife, but Daddy assured me that Hillary is Bill Clinton's wife. I really didn't want to go that much. But Daddy said he would buy me Legos if I came. Standing in the crowd, I was a little bit scared, because recently we saw the movie, "Vantage Point" about the attempted assassination of a President, from the perspectives of eight different people.
While waiting outside at the senior center, we ran into Daddy's friends Rog and Amy Bates. Rog is a comedian, so that made the wait seem shorter. When President Clinton arrived, he talked about why his wife would make a good president, because she's very caring and wants everyone to be able to afford health care insurance, has good ideas on how to respond to global warming and create jobs that help the environment. He also said Hillary would encourage automakers to build cars that get 100 miles to the gallon. My dad's car, born the year I was born, 1997, gets about 20 miles to the gallon, he says, and gas prices are going way up.
As he was leaving, he passed by everyone, and I got to shake his hand. His hand was cold, but he warmly said to me, "thank you for coming." There was a secret service man right behind him who scared me because he stared at everyone who shook hands with the president. We watched as President Clinton was whisked away in a big black SUV with lots of police cars around.
Next week with the Boy Scouts I am going to Washington to tour the White House.
George Will: "The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to being ranked as America's worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow."
I would add that in 1932, Americans elected as president a man who had served as governor of New York for less than four years. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, most historians agree, was one of the nation's greatest presidents.
Frank Rich, New York Times: "Experience, like nastiness, may prove a dead end...In 1960, the experience card was played by all comers against the young upstart senator from Massachusetts. In Iowa, LBJ went so far as to tell voters that they should vote for "a man with a little gray in his hair." But experience, Kennedy would memorably counter, "is like taillights on a boat which illuminate where we have been when we should be focusing on where we should be going."
Patrick Healy, New York Times: Obama "only needs to pass a gut check with enough voters on the experience issue, as Kennedy did. Or so he hopes."
As George W. Bush has become the most unpopular sitting president in the recorded history of polling -- more unpopular even than Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate -- the Republican Party's nostalgia for Ronald Reagan, their most popular president in modern memory, has grown. Thanks to his background as an actor, his ability to speak with humor, tell well-spun anecdotes (true or not) and literary-minded speechwriters like Peggy Noonan, Reagan was without question a "great communicator" that Republican leaders and candidates in 2008 would do well to emulate.
In the popular imagination, Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, at least in his fourth year (1980) was ineffectual in staying on top of crises. Double-digit inflation, an energy crisis, refugee crises, Iranian crisis -- Carter seemed overwhelmed by the time voters went to the polls in November of 1980. Likewise, George W. Bush has seemed overwhelmed since 2005 -- over his head in Iraq, responding poorly to Hurricane Katrina, and to the growing gap between rich and poor. On the economy, his response is simply more tax cuts.
When Reagan came to power in 1981, he was much better at dominating events and giving a sense that he was in control, in charge, than either Carter or Bush, and that continued through his re-election campaign in 1984, and even into his negotiations with the Soviets in 1987.
But New York Times columnist Paul Krugman offers a healthy perspective on Reagan and Bush in a series of columns.
"Mr. Bush is what Mr. Reagan would have been given the opportunity," he wrote. Cronyism, abuse of power, catering to wealth and corporate interests were also part of the Reagan administration. "People whose ideology says that government is always the
problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they
use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people
who will actually do their jobs."
But unlike Bush, Reagan "was lucky in his limitations," Krugman theorizes. He had to govern in coalition with a Democratic Congress, which made him more accountable than Bush, who had a rubberstamp Republican Congress for much of his presidency. And the fact that there were still two superpowers "helped prevent the hubris, the delusions of grandeur, that led the Bush
administration to believe that a splendid little war in Iraq was just
the thing to secure its position."
In an earlier column, Krugman pointed out that Reagan was much more fiscally responsible than Bush. Reagan "followed his huge 1981 tax cut with two large tax increases. In
fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many
people." In sum, a broad consensus of the American people respected Ronald Reagan because he proved to be, on both foreign and domestic policy, pragmatic, showing a far greater sense of responsibility and far greater ideological flexibility than George W. Bush has shown.
The unrealistic nostalgia for Reagan has gone so far that "Today's Republicans Might Not Nominate the Real Reagan," McClatchy's Washington Bureau points out. "They want to put his face on Mount Rushmore, but Republicans today are
demanding such ideological purity that they might not even nominate
Ronald Reagan for president if he were to run now," Steve Thomma reports.
Reagan supported amnesty for three million undocumented workers. He signed the first pro-abortion law in the nation as governor of California. He raised taxes several times as governor and president. He embraced Keynesian economics and massive deficit spending. He trusted our arch-enemy, the "evil empire" enough to negotiate arms reduction.
Perhaps the Republican efforts to view Reagan with rose-colored glasses isn't that different from Democrats' idealization of John and Robert Kennedy, to view them as heroic liberals rather than (often) the pragmatic or risk-averse moderates that they actually were. Indeed, some of the Kennedys' actions (supporting counter-insurgencies, supporting the overthrow of foreign governments such as Diem in South Vietnam, supporting wiretapping of Martin Luther King without warrants) are downright right-wing by today's standards.
My Take on Various Presidents (audio and video of Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt; my thoughts on Bush's second inaugural, why Clinton won the 1992 election, why George Herbert Walker Bush lost the 1992 election)
This is believed to be the oldest known recording of any president of the United States (Source):
Michigan State University Library has posted audio recordings of a number of presidents, including two clips from Grover Cleveland, who served as president from 1881-1885, and 1989-93.
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