One of these things is not like the other
By Shorter WaPo:
Contrary to the presidents assertion, lots of his opponents want to do something about the economy. Ergo, Barack Obama’s rhetorical strategy for pushing the stimulus is so totally like the rhetorical strategy used by George W. Bush to push for ideas like the war in Iraq!!111ONE!!1EXCLAMATION POINT11!!
Jeebus. There are of course, folks out there who would literally do “nothing” in the face of economageddon. But the fact that single-note tax-cut zealots — which at last count would include 35 of the 41 Republicans in the Senate among many, many others — favor doing “something” doesn’t diminish the fact that their policy proposals would be next to useless if actually implemented. Moreover, rhetorical oversimplifications can’t very well mask the fact that Obama and the Congressional Democrats have already given away quite a bit to appease these people while avoiding proposals that (a) might actually work but that would (b) arouse Republicans into fits of incomprehensible red-baiting.
The problem with the Bush administration was that it developed a conga line of terrible, ideologically-inspired ideas and then implemented them, to the extent that they could, on the assumption that everything would work out for the best and that showers of candy and flowers would be their eventual reward (see, for example, “Iraq, the clusterfucking of”). The Bush administration never planned for the worst case scenarios and then, through a combination of inaction and intention, permitted them to transpire anyway. So far, the broad knock on Obama seems to be that he’s allowing terrible, ideologically-inspired ideas from his adversaries to limit — or completely remove from contention — policies that tow a strong weight of evidence suggesting that they’d actually have positive results. To a certain extent, that’s just the way things go. There’s no reason to be happy about it, but it’s the inevitable consequence of a political system that forces you to deal with crazy people.
But if folks in the Obama administration share their predecessors misplaced optimism, we’re in for a world of shit. It would be hyperbolic at this point to compare the Geithner plan to the abhorrently bad Defense Department planning for post-war Iraq, but I’m depressed by the fact that it’s the first comparison that shot to mind.
Point being, any rhetorical similarities between Obama and Bush are meaningless if the policy results are substantially different. And if, at the end of the day, we wind up in worst straits than we should be, the rhetorical similarities between Obama and Bush won’t help us understand how we got that way.