I'm a fervent enough Clinton supporter from 2008 to have never quite warmed to Austan Goolsbee, one of then candidate Obama's key economic advisors. And not much, since, has changed my opinion of him, or his economic views.
So it's been hard for me to get too worked up, either way, with the announcement of his resignation to return to his tenured position at University of Chicago, one of those prized posts you don't just give up permanently.
Still, Golsbee's exit is as good a time as any to point out that I tend to agree with the generally dim view of many lefties of the President and his economic team. It is indeed telling, as many have observed, that pretty much all of the President's incoming economic team - his budget director, the head of his economic council and the council of economic advisors, just for starters - have all been replaced. It's probably even more indicative of the problems this Administration still has on economic policy that the most senior person in the room, now, is Tim Geithner, who - still - seems terribly grim and unpleasant in nearly all his television interviews, and an apologist for the banking sector.
If there's a reason to wonder if the President can survive the 2012 elections, it's all about failures of economic policy. The failure to rein in banks. The failure to squarely address the foreclosure mess. The failure to make sure the have-nots in our society are adequately protected and helped, over the haves.And, yes, the failure to the combination of government revenues and spending which have allowed deficits to spin further out of control, making much of our bad economic situation in this country that much worse.
It's not that Austan Goolsbee somehow, magically, had the way to address these issues; no one has those powers. The real problem which Goolsbee always embodied, for me, was the sense that Obama, as an executive, was not necessarily temperamentally that different from George W. Bush, in that he seems especially dependent on a small group of close friends and advisors, mainly from Chicago who tend to treat him with a kind of deference and loyalty that seems especially damaging. There's no one, even now, who seems both close to the President and able to challenge the prevailing worldview of a set of well educated, well off, like minded intellectuals. If Goolsbee was, as I suspect, the closest thing there was to that in the room, then his leaving is somehow as bad as it seems - the pool of close loyalists shrinks, and anything like a dissenting voice is even further away.
There's just no way, at this late date, to dress up this President's economic policies as better than miserable failures. The only saving grace, really, is that the alternatives, as embodied in Republicans and the right, are pretty much worse to nonexistent. No President in modern times may have survived economic conditions as bad as this President might... but the previous examples do have stark choices that this round seems to lack. Jimmy Carter looked much better than Gerald Ford. Ronald Reagan was more appealing to many than Carter. Bill Clinton was clearly superior to continuing with George HW Bush. I don't think you get the same feel from, say, Tim Pawlenty or MItt Romney, never mind Michelle Bachmann. Or Herman Cain.
Perhaps the healthiest result of letting this economic debacle play out - as bad as it is, and as worse as it could get - is that we may, in the long run see some discrediting of the current orthodoxy, especially on the left, that we can only trust the views of an educated, professional elite. Not, as the right would have it, to enshrine a kind of Luddite, anti-intellectual populism... but to begin to look to a wider range of education, experience, and ideas. It's too bad we may have to blow up the Democratic Party along the way... but that's what we probably deserve for putting too much faith in Austan's powers.
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