Have you spotted the evolving narrative yet?
Today at his press conference, President Obama claimed that people may have been confused by what he did early on with the massive spending because it was an “emergency” and he had to do something quickly. Or said another way, he rushed everything through as quickly as he could – despite his promises – because the situation demanded it. It wasn’t because he wanted too – it was because he had too.
You know, like the pure pork stimulus bill, most of which was scheduled to be spent in later years. And, of course, although many would like to lay TARP completely at Bush’s feet it should be remembered it was a Democratic Congress that passed that and Obama voted yes.
The point this new meme, of course is to cast himself as much more of a deficit hawk who was put in the position of saving the world (and his reaction argues against any claim of being a deficit hawk, by the way) – the emergency he continued to talk about today.
Timothy Egan at the NYT employs a variation on the theme in an article hilariously entitled, “How Obama saved Capitalism and lost the midterms”. No. Really – that’s his claim. Obama saved Capitalism. Because intruding on the natural processes of capitalism and not allowing them to take their natural course actually saves capitalism from, well, I suppose capitalism.
Yeah, it’s a pretty funny in a weird sort of NYT kind of way.
Most, except perhaps Egan, understand that capitalism isn’t something that “fails”. It is as much a process as anything and it is built upon the trillions of private individual interactions that voluntarily happen daily. What Egan claims Obama did isn’t at all true. What Obama did was prop up crony capitalism by bailing out institutions that had been incentivized by government to behave badly. End of story. And then he went on to prop up manufacturers (car companies) that had been managed badly and were failing all on their own. Neither action has a thing to do with capitalism per se. Markets reward success and are brutal to failure. Propping up failure has nothing to do with markets and thus nothing to do with market capitalism. Had both GM and Chrysler gone under, the best parts would have emerged under some other car company. The fact is we’d still be going cars today had they gone under, just not those cars.
Obama may not have been among those who created the incentives that created the financial problems – although it was rather disappointing to see one of them win reelection in MA – but the fact remains that at base, Obama was using borrowed money to keep the government/private bank scam it precipitated from collapsing the whole economy as the bubble they’d created burst. Again, that’s not a problem of capitalism.
So Egan’s premise? Well, it’s simply nonsense.
On the eve of the day after a “shellacking” as Obama called it during the presser, I suppose the left is looking for any silver lining it can find. Even if it is to be found in that for which they claim the president supposedly didn’t get proper credit. Egan might have had a slight chance at credibility if he’d claimed that the “emergency” actions of the Obama administration had kept the recession from being deeper – that’s at least debatable.
But saving Capitalism?
That’s just ignorance on a stick.
~McQ