Clive Crook responds:
In appraising Obama's first year, one should certainly take note of his poisoned inheritance. If I haven't always done so, it might be because I think the point so obvious that repeating it gets tiresome.
This is not what he wrote in his original post. There he said specifically that mentioning the inheritance, as James Carville proposed, was pointless because "who cares? Carville is wrong. What does it matter who caused the problem? Obama's job is to solve it." But when the vast majority of Obama's debt problem – which the GOP is now merrily blaming entirely on him – is Bush's and the Republicans', it strikes me as vital for Obama to do just as Reagan did in his first SOTU:
Our current problems are not the product of the recovery program that’s only just now getting under way, as some would have you believe; they are the inheritance of decades of tax and tax, and spend and spend. […] The only alternative being offered to this economic program is a return to the policies that gave us a trillion-dollar debt, runaway inflation, runaway interest rates and unemployment.
Would Clive have excoriated Reagan for this passage – as he confronted similar deceptions and opportunism from his opposition at the time. Moreover, contrary to Clive's assertion, it is emphatically not Obama's job alone to solve the fiscal crisis.
The executive has no power to spend or tax. The legislature has. I agree entirely with Clive's fundamental point that we need to raise taxes and cut entitlements and have been banging on about this for years. But again, Obama endorsed a congressional commission that would have mandated an up or down vote on long-term fiscal sanity before the SOTU, decried its failure in the SOTU, and pledged a presidential commission instead. Clive just dismisses the very solution he favors with this:
He said this must not be a way to kick the issue down the road. That is what it would be, of course.
Of course. So in effect, Clive is accusing the president of bad faith. And by ignoring the role of the total obstructionism of the Republicans – their unanimous refusal, for example, to reinstate pay-as-you-go rules in budgeting – Clive indeed does rig the debate so that Obama comes out poorly whatever he does. And indeed every obvious statement of bipartisanship that the president made – against the rank partisanship of his opponents – is simply dismissed by Clive as something that "came over" as disingenuous.
So if Obama says he wants reform, he's insincere. And if he doesn't, he isn't offering a "solution". You can see why the president cannot win. And how Clive's post sets him up for precisely that.
The Dish 