White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said that the president was bothered “a ton” by the thought of Mitt Romney winning the presidency and reaping credit for Obama’s perceived economic successes, saying that it could’ve been a massive setback for left-wing economic policy.
Pfeiffer was speaking with the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein and Jennifer Bendery.
“The thing that worried him most about losing was the idea that he would lose, Romney would come in, the economy would now do what it’s doing, because it’s on a trajectory –” Pfeiffer began, “and all the credit would go to Romney,” Stein interjected.
“Yes, that would be super-annoying,” Pfeiffer continued, “but also that [Romney’s] economic policies were the ones that led to this growth, which would’ve been a huge setback for the long-term case for progressive economics. All of the sudden it’s like, if you put in the Ryan budget, you get 4.5 percent growth, or whatever. That was something that bothered [Obama] a ton.”
A couple of things here. One, it’s true that economies don’t just shift overnight in response to policy changes. It takes time for an economy to react to the government (and other factors, for that matter). But Pfeiffer seems to be setting an arbitrary cutoff at which that reaction occurs. What’s the argument? That two years of the Romney administration would’ve been totally subordinate to four years of the Obama administration? That it takes six years for a White House’s economic policies to produce positive numbers?
Two, even if we grant some credence to the latter argument in this particular case — the financial crisis was a doozy, and the economy was never going to be healed overnight — it’s difficult to say that the Obama economy’s “trajectory” has led us directly to the current point. Consider the administration’s first-term economic policies that actually took effect: Obamacare, the stimulus, Dodd-Frank, the auto bailouts, the preservation of individual income tax rates under the “Bush tax cuts” (hardly a “progressive” policy), and the enactment of the Budget Control Act, a truly idiotic piece of legislation that led to the pinnacle of all D.C. jargon, “the sequester.” (I may have missed some others.)
The stimulus was there to provide immediate relief — even if the funds weren’t all spent at once, such policy does not exist to produce results a half-decade down the road, else it’d be called something other than “stimulus.” (“Time-release economics” doesn’t sound too catchy.)
The auto bailouts helped preserve jobs in the there and then.
So what are we to say? A combination of cumbersome healthcare and financial reform, some status quo tax policy, and a directive of forced spending cuts has taken us to 18,000 on the Dow Jones and some long-awaited signs that long-term growth is a’coming? Seems like there might be some forces other than “progressive economics” at work.
“The specific thing around the economy and Romney would be that Reagan — because the economy did well under Reagan, even though some of the work was done before Reagan got there, we believed in this country for a long time that it was less government, less taxes is good for economic growth,” Pfieffer continued. “And we have been battling that conception, and Democrats were forced to play on that field for a very long time. We want to change that field.”
