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The [Tuesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

I hope to return on Thursday.
“President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009 during a brutal recession, quickly pushed through a sizable stimulus package and then spent the next several years realizing it wasn’t nearly big enough. Joe Biden is determined not to have the same regrets if he wins,” Politico reports.


“In Obama’s early years in the White House, liberals complained about the influence of some of his more center-left advisers including former Treasury Secretaries Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner.
“Some progressives spent years criticizing Obama for decisions they saw as too friendly to Wall Street. They also saw Obama’s roughly $800 billion stimulus package as too small to address the scope of the Great Recession, a mistake they say helped lead to years of slow growth – for which Obama and Biden are still getting hammered politically – and increasing income inequality.”
You know whose name isn’t in this piece? The person who “spearheaded” the stimulus package, and that wasn’t Joe Biden. It was Rahm Emanuel.
“When economic advisers pressed for a stimulus package that would exceed $1 trillion, Emanuel warned that the price tag would create a kind of sticker shock. His argument prevailed and the stimulus was held to $787 billion,” the Tribune reported upon Rahm’s departure from the White House in 2010.
Rahm argued that the word “trillion” was bad optics – no matter the human cost of falling short of what people and the economy needed. Obama agreed, and as he did so often, negotiated against himself by defining down the ask and letting Republicans bargain for even less.
But then, Rahm always seems to escape accountability – perhaps because of his cozy relationships (including as a source) with elite journalists who keep him on TV and on the nation’s leading Op-Ed pages. One of the most noxious players in our political lives has managed to inoculate himself from responsibility for his actions.
Take this March account from Vox comparing the 2008 financial scandal that wrecked the economy to today’s coronavirus-wracked economy.
“Former Obama chief of staff Emanuel spearheaded the administration’s 2008 stimulus negotiations with lawmakers,” Vox notes. Then Vox lets him get away with blaming the too-small size of the stimulus on Republicans and paint himself as heroic for trying to push money out the door as fast as possible. Not that Republicans didn’t deserve blame, but Rahm and his boss lowballed themselves before even picking up the phone to start negotiations.
“There was an obvious tension between the warning about the extent of the financial crisis, which would require large-scale spending, and the warning about the looming federal budget deficits, which would require fiscal restraint,” Ryan Lizza reported for The New Yorker in 2012.
“The tension reflected the competing concerns of two of Obama’s advisers. Christina Romer, the incoming chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, drafted the stimulus material. A Berkeley economist, she was new to government. She believed that she had persuaded Summers to raise the stimulus recommendation above the initial estimate, six hundred billion dollars, to something closer to eight hundred billion dollars, but she was frustrated that she wasn’t allowed to present an even larger option. When she had done so in earlier meetings, the incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, asked her, ‘What are you smoking?’ She was warned that her credibility as an adviser would be damaged if she pushed beyond the consensus recommendation.”
Rahm’s credibility, however, is seemingly invulnerable. He could cover up the murder of a man on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
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“Even as the severity of the economic crisis became clear, Obama and Congress worked together to make the stimulus smaller,” Lizza reported.
And something like a third of the package was non-stimulative tax cuts designed to lure Republican votes that never came.
But Rahm is still out there dispensing advice, having somehow cadged his way into a reputation as a political genius despite a dismal record at everything he’s touched except the media manipulation that’s gone along with it.
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Posted on September 15, 2020