If a tree falls in the Beltway and nobody reports on it, does it make a sound?
Last Wednesday Austan Goolsbee – soon to be the ex-Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to President Obama – appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Goolsbee is about to head back to a teaching gig at the University of Chicago and Stewart spent a lot of time pointing out how “giddy” Goolsbee appeared to be now that he was getting out of Washington. Goolsbee didn’t make much of an attempt to refute Stewart’s assessment.
During the interview Stewart asked Goolsbee to explain to him why Obama had seemingly acquiesced to using the debt ceiling discussions as an excuse to suddenly start talking about getting the deficit under control. After all, Stewart pointed out, we had been told by the Obama White House that the stimulus had been what was needed and that it had worked. Why then would Obama now, in essence, decide to do the opposite and focus entirely on cutting the deficit and government spending?
Goolsbee’s response was interesting. Substantively, he punted and never really did answer Stewart’s question. Instead he simply reasserted that an economic stimulus had been required back in early 2009 and then claimed as well that “dealing with the long-term deficit” is also something that has to be addressed. He did not explain why it had to be addressed now, when one would think that greater and further stimulus efforts are really what is needed. But the most interesting rationale Goolsbee provided was the following: now that the deficit had been dealt with (kind of) by the Deficit Reduction Two-Step Shuffle, the President and the government could “pivot back” and start addressing the nation’s economic woes again.
Really?
Obviously, I don’t know Goolsbee and I am glad he is happy to be making his way back to academia, but if the man has spent the past two and a half years in the bowels of Washington and still thinks that now the government can pivot back to focusing on substantive economic issues the man is . . . well, he seems a little thick to tell you the truth.
Were this a fiction then I suppose it could be considered kind of naively charming to think of the President and his economic advisors imagining that they still have the power to set the nation’s agenda: ‘Look! they’re still innocents,’ we could all admiringly cry, happy that their basic humanity hadn’t been subsumed in cynicism. But in the event this sort of naiveté is just chilling. If the President thought he was cutting a deal by acquiescing to Republican demands in exchange for the power to frame the argument going into the 2012 election then, once again, he has traded the nation’s birthright for a mess of pottage.
