Rachel Maddow, duly elected Fake President of America, offered a different version of President Obama's lackluster Tuesday night address:
The United States Senate will pass an energy bill. This year. The Senate version of the bill will not expand offshore drilling. The earlier targets in that bill for energy efficiency and for renewable energy-sources will be doubled or tripled.
If Senators use the filibuster to stop the bill, we will pass it by reconciliation, which still ensures a majority vote. If there are elements of the bill that cannot procedurally be passed by reconciliation, if those elements can be instituted by executive order, I will institute them by executive order
Like Jon Chait, from whom this came, I'm not impressed. Set aside the fact that that the Senate can't do an energy bill in reconciliation because, unlike health care and higher-ed reform, last year's budget instructions don't include that option -- a reconciliation-passed bill wouldn't be very effective, as Dave Roberts usefully explains.
Procedural technicalities aside, just imagine Fake President Maddow trying to double or triple the efficiency targets in negotiations with auto state liberals like, say, John Dingell and Carl Levin, much less Democrats and Republicans who oppose the bill for ideological reasons rather than protecting their parochial interests -- it'd be like running into a brick wall.
Then Fake President Maddow would feel a lot like Real President Obama, which is to say, without a ton of options. Is she going to withhold her campaign appearances? They didn't want her on the trail with them anyway, not in this political climate. Will she attack them publicly or veto their bills? Now they won't vote for her Fake Supreme Court nominee, Pam Karlan, or support her strong legislation to create new jobs.
We could do this for hours -- "But Tim, when Fake President Maddow withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan it saved us billions, and her bank nationalization plan ... " -- and I sympathize with those ideas. The reality is, however, that there serious constraints on what a president can do, and there is a difference between bold leadership and setting expectations so high that disappointment is inevitable. Many progressives trust Maddow, and for good reason. But I worry that when they compare her platform with that of Obama, they'll be unjustly disillusioned, which will have real consequences in elections down the road -- and to public policy. (Get ready for Fake President Beck's Oval Office addresses).
The president needs the kind of criticism that Maddow and like-minded folks provide in order to push the boundary of what conventional wisdom perceives as acceptable -- her comments about off-shore drilling in that fake speech are laudable. But this criticism needs to be tempered with a dose of pragmatism so her viewers can judge the president on a reasonable scale.
-- Tim Fernholz
