As a follow-up to my earlier post on the Blue Dogs, Tim Fernholz notices the Obama campaign conducting some outreach, including sending economic policy director Jason Furman to tell them that Obama would run "a government unified around the concept of fiscal discipline and centered around the pay-go rule." It would be extremely odd to "unify" your government around fiscal discipline and "center" it around pay-go, rather than just being fiscally disciplined and not repealing pay-go, but that's how constituency outreach goes, I guess. Even so, the concept of "fiscal discipline" -- or its sister term, "fiscal responsibility" -- is interesting here, and gives the Obama campaign some wiggle room. The terms have come to mean something like a governance approach akin to how Grover Norquist pretends Ronald Reagan governed. But there's no reason a President Obama couldn't simply say that it would be extremely fiscally undisciplined and irresponsible to cut spending during a recession or leave our health care problems to blow a hole in the federal budget in 30 years. In theory, fiscal responsibility means doing the responsible thing, not the doctrinaire conservative thing, and I rather hope the Obama campaign is using the term in that manner.
