Once
upon a time, American politics was the domain of stout-hearted, straight-
talking men. Patrick Henry said, "Give me
liberty or give me death." William Tecumseh
Sherman gave his name to statements that left no room for
misinterpretation: "If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve."
Harry Truman said "The
buck stops here." And then things started to get all weaselly.
The
Nixon era, the golden age of deception, gave us among other gems, the
non-denial denial, a quintessentially Washington concept that has endured and
evolved over the years, ultimately reaching its apotheosis with Bill Clinton's "I did not
have sexual relations with that woman."
Donald
Rumsfeld became the Greg Louganis of obfuscation via convolution with his
double triple inside out back flip of a statement: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There
are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns.
There are things we don't know we don't know."
And
now, we have, courtesy of President Barack Obama, the latest illustration of
pol-speak: the non-supportive supportive statement. Yesterday, in response to a
question about whether he planned any changes in his economic team, Obama said:
Well, look, I ... I have not made any determinations about personnel. I think
Larry Summers and Tim Geithner have done an outstanding job, as have my whole
economic team. This is tough, the work that they do. They've been at it for two
years. And, you know, they're going to have a whole range of decisions about
family that'll factor into this as well. But the bottom line is -- is that
we're constantly thinking, is what we're doing working as well as it could? Do
we have other options and other alternatives that we can explore?"
Yes. We know that whole range of decisions about family. It's so thoughtful
of you to think of their families, Mr. President.
That's
Washington, folks. One minute the words feel like an embrace and the next that crunching sound you hear
is coming from your own bones under the wheels of the bus beneath which you
have been deposited. By your boss. The president.
Naturally,
the White House quickly denied that any changes were being planned. But, ask yourself, if your boss got on
national television and said he hadn't made any decisions about whether you
would keep your job but that you really ought to start thinking about the
family you haven't been spending enough time with, how long would it take you
to start loading up your G20 Finance Minister bobble head dolls and "World's
Greatest Economist" mugs into a cardboard box and heading for the exit?
There
is a special term used in Washington for the kind of quick denial offered up by
the White House press office. It refers
to something somewhere between a lie and a frail fact wrapped in a mountain of
bullshit. It's called "business as
usual." And if yesterday hadn't been the
day that The National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the recession
ended back in June 2009, it would have been the hardest thing to believe said
in Washington for, well, hours and hours.
But
seriously...
Since
I am already on the record saying that Obama should upgrade his economic team
dramatically and that there are ways to do this that could continue to give him
the benefit of the considerable gifts of both Geithner and Summers, let me turn
briefly to one related subject. Please read the article
entitled "Fearing a soaring deficit, many analysts favor
letting Bush tax cuts expire" in today's Washington
Post. Count me among those analysts.
The benefits to the economy of letting the disastrous Bush tax cuts
expire -- in terms of very nearly eliminating the deficit, in terms of renewed
faith of international investors in the United States, in terms of lower
borrowing costs and on many other levels -- outweigh the pinch Americans will
feel from the re-imposition of the cuts. The president should demonstrate true leadership by letting them
lapse.
I fear that is not what will happen and that
expediency and politics will result in the extension of all of them for another
two years based on the specious argument that we can't afford a tax hike right
now in a fragile economy. That's the opposite of the truth. We very clearly
couldn't afford the cuts in the first place and we can't afford them now.
Update: Good news for Larry Summers's family? Here's the latest on the economic team's saga.
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