If you want to see why Washington has been in such deadlock since the GOP took over Congress, look no farther than two talks of this past Monday.<\/p>\n
The first was President Obama\u2019s speech on the economy, delivered in the noon hour within the White House complex. \u00a0Many commentators described it as \u201cunhelpful\u201d and that it surely was.\u00a0 The president never misses an opportunity to poison the atmosphere in this city.<\/p>\n
Particularly on that day.\u00a0 As he spoke, the Washington Navy Yard was locked down. It appears now that the shooter who took 12 lives that morning was not a terrorist.\u00a0 He was an ordinary man who had tipped into murderous insanity after months of struggle against voices that spoke to him from the walls and floors wherever he went.\u00a0 But this was not known when the president took to the podium.\u00a0 Police were still in search of accomplices, though to number, according to media reports, between one and three \u2013 in other words, there was still substantial reason to believe that a major command center of the U.S. Navy was under terrorist assault.<\/p>\n
Any presidential discussion of domestic issues, particularly invoking politics, would have been inappropriate.\u00a0 If he felt he had to discuss domestic issues, the president should have talked in a way that acknowledged the good faith of both political parties.\u00a0 Even if he didn\u2019t believe that both parties were acting in good faith, he should have said they were.\u00a0 And he should not have come off as partisan.<\/p>\n
At a much less challenging moment at the same time in his presidency, Ronald Reagan also took on Congress over the budget.\u00a0 But even as he knocked Congress generically, he spoke not in partisan terms but against \u201cspenders\u201d and \u201ctax increasers\u201d and included humor.\u00a0 In one of the most famous lines of his presidency, he said, finishing with the echo of a Clint Eastwood moment, \u201cI have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers. Go ahead\u2013make my day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Obama\u2019s equivalent to Reagan\u2019s good-natured prodding began with, \u201cThe problem at the moment, Republicans in Congress don\u2019t seem to be focused on how to grow the economy and grow the middle class.\u00a0 I say \u2018at the moment\u2019 because I\u2019m still hoping that a light bulb goes off here.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is hard to imagine how the president could have a remark more calculated to enrage the Congressional GOP, not even acknowledging their commitment to economic growth and the welfare of middle income Americans and attacking them in the most directly partisan terms.<\/p>\n
Reagan\u2019s remarks stopped a move to boost taxes in its tracks.\u00a0 Within a year and a half, he had engineered bipartisan passage of tax reform legislation that lowered personal income tax rates to the lowest level of the post-World War II era, even while giving Democrats provisions they needed.\u00a0 After Mr. Obama\u2019s speech, it is difficult to imagine that kind of outcome now, if the White House even wants one.<\/p>\n
I mentioned that there was another event that provided a sharp contrast to the president\u2019s on Monday.\u00a0 It took place a half block from the White House Complex at the offices of the Council on Foreign Relations and was also during lunchtime.<\/p>\n
There, former Secretary of Treasury Henry M. Paulson, Jr., and former Congressman Barney Frank spoke about the global financial crisis of 2008-9.\u00a0 Many conservatives are critical \u2013 highly critical \u2013 of Paulson\u2019s tenure at Treasury.\u00a0 I have a different view.\u00a0 The seizing of up of the derivative market in the spring of 2008 following the Bear Sterns crisis and the further freezing of markets following the collapse of Lehman Brothers that September had, I believe, created a crisis of monetary aggregates.\u00a0 By injecting base money into the banking system, the actions of the Federal Reserve and Paulson\u2019s TARP program enabled the American and global financial structures to survive until the markets free up again. Drawing on the writings of Milton Friedman, I predicted at the time (http:\/\/bit.ly\/16qwQLa<\/a><\/i><\/b>\u00a0<http:\/\/bit.ly\/16qwQLa><\/a>\u00a0) that, thanks to those actions, we would come out the crisis in short order, so long as, I warned, the Obama administration abandoned its grandiose and misguided plans. They didn\u2019t. We didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the point.\u00a0 It was clear from the Paulson-Frank discussion that the George W. Bush Administration worked hard and effectively to win the support of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, exactly the opposite approach of the current never-miss-a-chance-to be-petty crowd.<\/p>\n Why is Washington not working now?\u00a0 That difference tells why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you want to see why Washington has been in such deadlock since the GOP took over Congress, look no farther than two talks of this past Monday. The first was President Obama\u2019s speech on the economy, delivered in the noon hour within the White House complex. \u00a0Many commentators described it as \u201cunhelpful\u201d and that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[190,12,189,60,104],"class_list":["post-1661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic-policy-the-great-financial-crisis","tag-federal-reserve","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-monetary-policy","tag-obama","tag-speech"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1661"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1663,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661\/revisions\/1663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}