I hope the president isn’t listening to criticism of his vacation. Favorable comparisons against Bush’s long weeks of brush clearing at Crawford can’t be admitted by the Right because, after all, the Cape Cod vacation fits the “Obama as elitist dilettante” narrative. Until tomorrow. Then he might be a Chicago thug if that description would fuel the conflagration better in the circumstance.
Determined critics simply will not be pleased. Not if Obama swore off leisure time for the balance of his term. Heck, I don’t think some people would be mollified if we passed a law that required him to stay in the Oval Office 24 hours a day in a 4’ x 4’ cage sitting at a school desk.
Last week I mused about the president’s problem with big business and suggested that the administration make a bigger deal of help for small businesses.
A Chamber of Commerce spokesman in the piece talks about a “tsunami of regulation emanating from the administration.” With the financial crisis and the oil spill so fresh in everybody’s memory it is hard to imagine there is much of a demand for easing up on regulation, but who knows what they will be able to get people riled up about. You wouldn’t have thought there would be a market for fretting about the deficit either.
Then there’s taxes. Regulation and taxes is always the conservative mantra. I don’t buy the argument that raising the tax rate by a couple of percentage points discourages investment and the entrepreneurial spirit. Say your business is looking at a terrific opportunity that will require a $100,000 investment and you anticipate a gross return of 20 percent, $13,000 after taxes. Would a looming tax increase of 2 percent, meaning you would only see $12,600, make you do a total 180 on the great idea and say “Nope, forget it then. My spirit is broken.”
The Chamber is holding a jobs summit tomorrow.
I still think talking more about small business would be a smart move. There’s even a small business jobs bill in play right now but you don’t hear a thing about it.
At the end of the NPR story the reporter opines that reaching out to the business world would alienate liberal voters. I don’t think you would find a lot of libs having a problem with the president reaching out to small business.
I’m sorry to see the White House bending to the will of the Right and Center, and going on a campaign to insist that Obama is not anti-business. This PR initiative—along with his nod to the deficit hawks—seems like a form of Clinton’s famous triangulation strategy—observe and tally up opinion numbers to see which way the wind is blowing, then say you’re for that.
Afterthought: Or maybe, as Paul Krugman says, it’s not public polling that sways the strategy, it’s news reports.
Big business has run amok—big oil, big health, big banks, but he could make a distinction that might prove interesting. It would make sense to double down on efforts you don’t hear enough about to help smaller businesses and entrepreneurs, where the real innovation and job growth comes from. Pump that up and make a big deal of it because it’s fair and smart. As a bonus it takes an arrow out of the Republicans’ quiver because the GOP and the Chamber of Commerce like to trot out the plight of small business when they really are shilling for huge business. See where they stand if a tax incentive were rolled out that dramatically favored tiny businesses and phased it down to zero at the 25th percentile of annual revenues.
By the way, the beneficiaries of help for small businesses aren’t always the smiling mom and pop retail store owners you see pictured in GOP pollster PowerPoints. I think one definition of a small business is 500 employees or less, which could be represented by a slightly different photo: a sprawling three-story complex in your average office park.
That’s funny, and typical, and tells me something about myself, again. The socialist in Congress is the only commentator I’ve heard so far who tied the banks to the oil companies as I did this morning.
Nice how MSNBC now lets you clip a clip to show just the part you’re talking about. And nice how they expose their text promo in the embed code so you can strip it off if you can read plain HTML.
There is nothing new to us about this. Haven’t we just seen how the giant financial firms almost destroyed the American economy? Wasn’t it just a few weeks before this hideous Deepwater Horizon disaster that a devastating mine explosion in West Virginia — at a mine run by a company with its own hideous safety record — killed 29 coal miners and ripped the heart out of yet another hard-working local community?
BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
I flatter myself that I think I understand the way Barack Obama must think.
People want to hear big indignant statements from him about the Gulf oil gusher because we’re indignant about it and we want him to represent us. But it’s posturing; we know that and he knows it. If he’s like me, he rolls his eyes when he encounters posturing by other people and he would rather not do the thing he scorns.
What he will do, because he’s expected to, is rail against the delay and fret about the damage. A better approach would be what Dan Froomkin suggests: seize the moment to talk about regulation, but not just about oil. He could chance it and be brave, generalize it—tying in mining and the banks, maybe even the Citizens United case, not minding what opponents might say about bashing business. It’s been building to this point since the Reagan years and now big business has run fully amuck.
I think I’ve finally exhausted myself with obsessing over outrages by the right wing. So much resentment poisons you, makes you bitter about everything. I still disagree with Republicans and especially its Tea Party wing, but I’m going to try not to let it run my life, try not to spend my mornings before leaving for work searching for something to be peeved about, try to avoid media outlets that make the divide their guiding principle. It might be a good pledge for a lot of us to take.
Fox and MSNBC shows: you might think about swearing off basing your story lineups on “Can you believe what they tried to pull off today?” Yes, even Rachel Maddow, who I think is great and with whom I almost always agree, aren’t you getting to be a more thoughtful flip side of Sarah Palin? Smiling through the jibes, cheerfully sniping, looking for outrages—hoping for them, even?
Newspaper columnists and bloggers: try talking as much about your own agendas as you do about the other team’s positions. I’d like to hear more about what the camps really stand for, less about what they’re against. Crazy when you have to learn about party positions by reading the other side.
I might not succeed. I’m going to find another channel; I’m outlining some fiction about a small-town conservative politician who has some redeeming qualities. The obsession started during the presidential campaign and it’s hard to break free. Probably a good thing, though, if we could…
But… but… but… Governor Palin says too much regulation caused the 2008 financial meltdown. And I think I need to believe her story, because… she’s just like me, and… socialism… and take our guns… and ivy league elitism… and… and… freedom!
