Daily Kos: Sunday’s NYT Lead: “White House Debates Fight on Economy”…Not.

Sun Aug 14, 2011 at 02:27 AM PDT

Sunday’s NYT Lead: “White House Debates Fight on Economy”…Not.

by bobswern

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There’s a rather surreal lead in Sunday’s NY Times by Binyamin Appelbaum and Helene Cooper, entitled: “White House Debates Fight on Economy.” What makes it quite incredible, IMHO, is the fact that, not too far into the piece, the following is attributed to White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer: “Dan Pfeiffer, the White House director of communications, said that there was no internal debate.”

What we learn is…

Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Plouffe, and his chief of staff, William M. Daley, want him to maintain a pragmatic strategy of appealing to independent voters by advocating ideas that can pass Congress, even if they may not have much economic impact. These include free trade agreements and improved patent protections for inventors.

Bold type is diarist’s emphasis.

Seriously? Read the blockquoted paragraph, above, one more time. (I had to read it a few times, myself; just to let it sink in.)

In addition to blaming the GOPers for the bottleneck in D.C., here’s the White House strategy…

…Mr. Plouffe and Mr. Daley share the view that a focus on deficit reduction is an economic and political imperative, according to people who have spoken with them. Voters believe that paying down the debt will help the economy, and the White House agrees, although it wants to avoid cutting too much spending while the economy remains weak.

As part of this appeal to centrist voters, the president intends to continue his push for a so-called grand bargain on deficit reduction — a deal with Republicans to make even larger spending cuts, including to the social safety net, in exchange for some revenue increases — despite the strong opposition of Congressional Democrats who want to use the issue to draw contrasts with Republicans...

Is the actual strategy of our Party in 2012 going to be one where hope is held out that the Republicans will just scare the crap out of the public so much, voters will feel so compelled to stop them that they’ll rush to the polls to re-elect the President?

You know, I never thought I’d say this—given that I’ve always found that a candidate running for re-election or election had to concisely provide reasons to the voter as to why they should cast their vote for them--but that strategy just might work…at least it would in a world where one is not tacitly demoralizing part of their base while attempting to underwhelm voters, in general; and, where their opposition is not spending a billion dollars to kick their ass.

…But Christina Romer, who stepped down last year as the chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said Mr. Obama should fight for short-term spending in combination with long-term deficit reduction.

“Playing it safe is not going to cut it,” said Ms. Romer, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Not proposing anything bold and not trying to do something to definitively deal with our problems would mean that we’re going to have another year and a half like the last year and a half — and then it’s awfully hard to get re-elected.”

But there is little support for such an approach inside the administration...

Please wake us up when this is over.

via dailykos.com

Posted via email from Brian's posterous