Let's Play the World's Smallest Violin for the Pod Save America Boys
On Wednesday, New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote a column on some of the biggest failures of the Obama administration, which Manjoo concludes were due to the administration’s reliance on neoliberal solutions to problems that required Roosevelt-level government intervention.
The column—which was pegged to a pair of new books, A Crisis Wasted by former FCC chair Reed Hundt, and Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by frequent Obama critic and Open Markets fellow Matt Stoller—was remarkably fair, crediting Obama and his administration for helping to put the brakes on a recession that otherwise might have slipped into another Great Depression. But Manjoo also criticized the administration for how it handled the stimulus package, as well as its broader adherence to Clintonite neoliberalism on issues like healthcare:
By the time Obama took office, job losses had accelerated so quickly that his advisers calculated the country would need $1.7 trillion in additional spending to get back to full employment. A handful of advisers favored a very large government stimulus of $1.2 trillion; some outside economists — Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, James Galbraith — also favored going to a trillion.
But Obama’s closest advisers declined to push Congress for anything more than $800 billion, which they projected would reduce unemployment to below 8 percent by the 2010 midterms. They were wrong; the stimulus did reduce job losses, but it was far too small to hit the stated goal — unemployment was 9.8 percent in November 2010.
Manjoo’s column was sharply-worded, but, again, fair. Nonetheless, it shot out like a bat signal to Obama administration alumni, including the Pod Save America boys, who are definitively the biggest chodes in the world of podcasting. Co-host and former senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer was first:
As radio host and Massachussetts politician Bill Humphrey pointed out, Manchin wasn’t even in the Senate at the time. It’s also worth mentioning that Obama himself endorsed Lieberman’s campaign over anti-war candidate Ned Lamont in the 2006 Democratic primary. (Lamont won the primary, but lost to Lieberman’s third-party campaign in the general.) And then, after Lieberman endorsed John McCain over Obama in 2008, Obama helped convince the Senate Democratic caucus to give Lieberman a slap on the wrist and let him keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security committee.