By Elvin Lim
Tea Party Republicans are about to be force-fed a slice of humble pie. In the first test of their political acumen since sweeping into Congress last year, they showed an ignorance of the first rule of democratic politics: never say never, because a politician’s got to be a politician.
Especially on an issue, the federal debt ceiling, with stakes as high as financial Armageddon itself! All the best intentions in the world, served up on the high horse of ideological purity, are about to bring the entire Republican party to its knees before Obama on this issue.
Ronald Reagan presided over 16 debt ceiling raises, Bush saw it raised 7 times. Did Tea Party Republicans really think that they could out-Republican Reagan and Bush? There’s the crux of any bargaining game — know thine chips. There is simply no way Wall Street and the Chambers of Commerce around the nation were going to sit around and let the Tea Party faction within the Republican fold play with this financial matter of life and death. Maybe it was the residue of last year’s electoral hubris, or maybe they believed the myth that fiscal conservatism is the one thing that unites Republicans, or maybe they forgot that the president wields a veto, but Tea Partiers and their leaders in Congress should never have done a repeat of George H. W. Bush’s “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Doing this backed them into a corner, flanked by no debt ceiling increases on the one side, and no tax increases on the other. Leaving no standing room left for compromises, the Tea Party caucus is about to realize that two negatives do not together make a “yes” from the White House. In fact, the only one who gets to say “no” with no less than constitutional gravity is the President.
Obama knew this issue was his to win all along, and he has played the Republicans like a fiddle, presenting himself as a grand negotiator and eminent pragmatist; the go-getter who slyly had it implied that checks for social security may not be sent out in August, and the media played along and covered the circus. But Obama knew that he never ever had to compromise, which is why he raised the goal of achieving a $4 trillion plan to ensure both that he looked presidentially ambitious, and that he would get exactly what he wants when the deal inevitably fails. Republican leaders trotted along to the White House negotiation table, willingly playing his game in part because they had to look like they were trying, but for the most part they were clueless about the plastic value of their bargaining chips.
It is one thing to take an extreme position, but it is another to take an extreme position on a matter that could precipitate financial Armageddon. I have to believe that anyone who is willing to take that risk has a part of herself who would like to see financial collapse on Wall Street, the decimation of corporate capitalism, and a return to Jacksonian laissez faire. The President is rather smugly playing this game because he knows that he doesn’t have to lift a hand because in the end, Wall Street will rein the Tea Party in. And so mainstream Republicans have allowed themselves to lose control of the message — which worked so very well in their favor when they were still focused on jobs — by talking themselves into corner on an issue they wrongly thought was more on their side than on the President’s. Wall Street is not conservative or Republican, Tea Partiers! It’s even more powerful than the liberals, and that’s why the Dow’s not even flinching.
Worse still,
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
The NAACP was doing its job when it accused the Tea Party movement of harboring “racist elements,” but it didn’t necessarily go about it in the most productive way.
All it took was for supporters of the Tea Party movement like Sarah Palin to write, “All decent Americans abhor racism,” and that with the election of Barack Obama we became a “post-racial” society, and the NAACP’s charge was soundly “refudiated.” Or, as Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell put it to Candy Crowley on CNN on Sunday, he’s “got better things to do” than weigh in on the debate. He was elected to deal with real problems, not problems made up in people’s heads. Case closed.
If one has decided not to see something, one won’t see it. (And to be sure, if one has decided to see something, one will always see it. That’s a stalemate.)
I think the NAACP ought to consider the possibility that the residuum of racism that exist today are more thoughts of omission than acts of commission. Racism is a very different beast today than it was on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation, or on the eve of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, it is so difficult to detect and even harder to eradicate precisely because it is no longer hidden behind a white conical hood.
Because our standard for what counts as “post-racialism” has gone up with each civil rights milestone, the NAACP should realize that as the old in-your-face racism is gone, so too should the old confrontational techniques of accusation and litigation. Unconscious racism can only be taught and remedied by explanation, not declamation.
To understand unconscious racism, consider the case of Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express, who was expelled by the Tea Party Federation, an organization that seeks to represent the movement as a whole when Williams posted a fictional letter to Abraham Lincoln, saying “We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards.”
The stridently mocking tone of this letter belied a breezy assumption that any and everyone could see that this was a l
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The 
Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s stimulus package. Read his previous OUPblogs here.
President-elect Obama’s big stimulus package is getting bulkier and more complex by the day. No longer confident that the Congress would be able to move quickly to deliver legislation for the newly sworn in president to sign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has tampered expectations by rejecting a “false deadline” for such a delivery.
As is always the case in Washington, we are scheduled for a clash of ideologies even as we seek a solution to our current economic woes. The Republicans want deliberation (or delay) and fiscal restraint and the Democrats want, well, big government. Cognizant of this, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already registered his wariness of “very big systemic changes” proposed in the stimulus package. Republican leaders have taken to calling the proposed $800 billion stimulus package a “trillion dollar” package even though about 40% of it will pay for tax cuts all sides agree on.
But Democrats are likely to prevail in this battle not only because of their store of electoral goodwill locked into congressional majorities, but also because economic history is presently on their side. Traditional monetary policy becomes increasingly ineffective as interest rates fall (because rates cannot fall below zero). The fact is that the banks are still not lending enough. Just in the last three months, cash holdings in banks have tripled to over 1 trillion dollars, according to the Federal Reserve. Other drivers of growth are also unavailable to us this time round. Inventory rebuilding was a powerful engine of growth in 1976, as was residential construction 1992, while consumer spending helped in 2002 (recall President Bush’s invitation for Americans to go out and shop after Sep. 11). The private sector in 2009 is moribund.
This is why Fed officials and economists have come out in support of a fiscal stimulus package. “If ever, in my professional career, there was a time for active, discretionary fiscal stimulus, it is now,” said Janet Yellen, San Francisco Fed president. According to Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics in New York, “When we do recover, the engine will be government spending, not home building or the consumer.” John Maynard Keynes, not Milton Friedman, is the dead economist du jour.
Since the September 2008 Wall Street crash, the S.& P. has moved more than 5 percent in either direction on 18 days. There were only 17 such days in the previous 53 years, according to calculations by Howard Silverblatt, an index analyst at S.& P. If the invisible hand of the market cannot calm its own nerves, then government must.
