Obama Dragging His Heels

Here is a bit from a NY Times article by David Leonhardt that looks at the odd passivity of the Democrats under Obama. Why is the Great Recession not stimulating the rhetoric and action of an FDR?

One of the political mysteries of the last year is why the White House and Congress have not been even more aggressive about trying to put people back to work.

It is true that President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress favor more stimulus and have been stymied by Republicans and, more recently, conservative Blue Dog Democrats worried about the deficit. But it’s also true that Mr. Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have done less than they could have.

The president has not wrapped his arms around teachers, firefighters and other government workers facing layoffs and dared Republicans to oppose him, much as he did with financial reregulation. He has not pushed for a big new round of tax cuts, which could also put Republicans in a bind. And the White House has been slow to fill vacancies at the Federal Reserve that could go to officials who favor the Fed’s doing more to lift economic growth.

Here's Leonhardt's analysis:

In the face of near-united Republican opposition, top Democrats have decided that the political costs of aggressively pushing for more stimulus are too high. Any new bill will help only on the margins, and it will give Republicans another chance to blame Mr. Obama for the deficit, even though the current deficit is more of their own party’s making. The Democrats may be right, too. We will never know, because we will never be able to re-run the 2010 election under a different set of circumstances.

Leonhardt goes into detail about the success of the 2009 stimulus package and asks, why not a 2010 bill to prevent a "double dip" recession?

Europe is cutting its own throat with a fiscal retrenchment. The Japanese continue their odd kabuki dance of a little financial easing quickly followed by fiscal tightening that has produced a two decade long recession. The only government able to respond intelligently to the recession has been Communist China. It is following in the footsteps of Nazi Germany which was the only government in the 1930s to demonstrate that stimulative spending could pull an economy out of depression. The lessons of history are lost on the current generation of polticians. Worse, the so-called "democratic" countries show less concern for their citizens that the authoritarian regimes of the 1930s or the 2000s. Incredible!