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Joe Klein:
In 1993, I did a pretty shabby job of covering Bill Clinton's economic plan. It was, in sum, a very good plan--it worked wonders for the economy--but I focused on the mishaps. (Clinton, for example, pulled the rug out from under House Democrats by offering a carbon tax, which they voted for...and then the President removed it from the bill.) Clinton couldn't get any Republican votes for the package. A disaster! He had trouble getting Democratic votes for it; he had to beg Bob Kerrey for his vote to get it through the Senate. His presidency was in ruins! He had lost all credibility! (Actually, those of us who had focused on some big ugly trees rather than the blooming forest were the ones who had lost credibility.)From a PR standpoint, the stimulus bill is an almost uniquely hard sell. They're making sausage without any casings. The thing that the press has taught Americans to hate in the legislative process -- the addition of odd, seemingly expensive, random, programs -- is the very point of the bill. The thing the press knows how to do with the legislative process -- figure out where money is being spent in an apparently embarrassing way -- describes half the provisions and discredits few of them. This bill needs to do what government is usually derided for doing: Spend money for the sake of spending money.Which makes it easy to attack. Yesterday, Michael Hirsh wrote that "Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough." He was right that that's the problem. But no one quite knows the solution. Short of Keynesian reeducation camps, it's hard to shift public understanding that far, that quickly. People aren't used to wondering whether the government is being insufficiently profligate.
