The Echo Chamber Comments on Clinton
Jim Babka on Aug 19th 2008
Punditry is generally trite and boring these days. Cable TV news must’ve ruined it. Jon Stewart, on “The Daily Show,” can demonstrate, with a handful of clips, that Capitol Hill culture is an echo chamber. Little original thought flows out. They just mimic each other. It’s so bad it appears someone writes the scripts for all the networks and their routine pundits.
But even Jon Stewart can become part of the echo chamber.
Jon Stewart suggested that Bill Clinton’s response to the question, “Is Barack Obama ready?” (which, by the way, was “You could argue that no one is ready for that job”) was the work of a passive-aggressive ass. (If you click the link, the relevant part starts at 2:20).
Jon wasn’t joking. It was what everyone in the media was saying, minus the cuss word. But there is another plausible explanation. It’s so novel that it’s amazing that it’s been overlooked in the DC echo chamber…
Maybe Bill Clinton really doesn’t think Barack Obama is ready for the job!
Capital gains tax increases, opposition to oil drilling, and a FDR-esque central plan for both energy and infrastructure? And a windfall profits tax? Are you serious? Really… Windfall profits tax? Huh. That seems so 1970s.
People are forgetting that Bill Clinton didn’t campaign as a Mondale-Dukakis liberal. He retained only two liberal economic positions in his 1992 campaign: a tax increase on the wealthy and a national health care plan. Those two liberal moves backfired. Just two years after his inauguration, Republicans took over the House and Senate. What was Clinton’s response? He declared, “The era of Big Government is over” (we had to wait for George W. Bush for that era of Big Government to come back).
Now, we can debate about how the budget was balanced, but it was, if you fraudulently counted the Social Security surplus. At least the national debt ceiling stopped getting increased. There was also welfare reform and other right-leaning positioning (a strategy called “triangulation”).
The banks are in trouble right now. Unemployment is up a bit and so too, apparently, is monetary inflation. And while oil is going to decline in price probably past Election Day, the long-term supply problem is only going to get worse. So be honest Republicans, if someone put a gun to your head and forced you to choose or get shot, “Do you want Bill Clinton or Barack Obama right now to fix the economic problems?” …you’d say Clinton, right?
Oil drilling. Would Clinton do it? Darned right he would! He wouldn’t let the Republicans steal the issue. But Obama is watching his poll numbers decline as Republicans press for “Drill, drill, drill.”
Windfall profits tax. Would Clinton be pushing such a thing? Maybe during the primary campaign, but as soon as he had the nomination sewn up, he’d drop that faster a molten ball of iron.
Central planning for energy? Well, even Hillary might do that, but Bill wouldn’t. He might even have a special task force or new government office to appease his liberal friends to make it look like he wanted planning. But that office would probably work for his friends in the industry — such an office would be more marketable than the Lincoln Bedroom.
But the point is, Bill’s not stupid and he’s got experience. He would want to make sure the Wall Street community felt safe with him.
And there are real differences between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. And no one recognizes them more than Bill Clinton does. It’s typical for both politicians and great scientists to see their way of doing things as the best, and their successors as unable to live up to the mark. But this goes deeper.
When Clinton tells Charlie Rose last December that Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd are “qualified” (see the clip above), he’s saying they are realists — like he is (and maybe that he’d like to make a sandwich with Dodd). They learned the lessons of the past.
When he reserves comment on Obama he’s saying that Obama is still too idealistic for the job — a.k.a., not ready.
I’m not applauding Clinton, only deploring the present state of punditry. No one on the Cable TV news channels has said what you just read here. It wasn’t in the echo chamber, so no one thought of it.
I ought to be on television: Maybe even Hardball.
Filed in The Bureau
But, and you must think about this seriously, note that it’s not Barack Obama vs. Bill Clinton; it’s Obama vs. Clinton’s wife, and it is she, whom it was said of that was the balls in the relationship, that whined and contended that it was sexism that led to Obama’s love-affair with the American media.
It won’t be Mr. Clinton’s economic policy that will be contended with Mr. Obama’s, but one regime versus another regime. The totality of the group effort. Congress enabled Clinton to try some economic levity, and it is Congress now that spends spends spends, despite our attempts to refrain them. They are the enablers, and it is the president who is the voice.