Blaming Obama: the New Spin-Game of Washington Hacks

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24 December 2009 :: J.E. Robertson

Pres. Barack Obama took office in the midst of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with two wars in Asia and skyrocketing unemployment, record numbers of bankruptcies, a financial services industry in a state of near total paralysis and/or collapse, and declining federal revenues with which to alleviate the fast-rising federal budget deficit. Not one of those aspects of life in 2009 America was caused by anything Barack Obama did before or after assuming the presidency. Yet the new game in Washington, DC, is blaming Obama for everything everyone else failed to do, both before and after he assumed the presidency.

In fact, Sen. Barack Obama fought hard, from the moment he entered the Senate, for new regulations on the financial sector and to guard against predatory lending, which would have helped prevent the credit crisis of 2008 from swelling into the catastrophic worldwide recession it has turned into. He had succeeded in pushing through strong bipartisan legislation against predatory lending in Illinois, when he was in the state Senate there, and upon arriving in Washington, in 2004, Obama saw very clearly how much money and propaganda were corrupting the process of government. He succeeded in pushing through tough new ethics reforms for Congress and built his campaign without taking any money from lobbyists.

Obama’s presidency is the American people’s presidency, and he has governed in a manner entirely consistent with that foundation. While not all of his grassroots supporters have seen all of their wildest dreams come true in the first year, he has opened the process of government to greater transparency and public participation than at any time in our nation’s history, and has advanced progressive policy goals further and in a shorter time than any previous president. Economic recovery is a more complex process than any pundit or opponent will allow, because it’s inconvenient for them to allow for that reality to sink in, and yet the mainstream public story is almost exclusively the over-simplified version proffered by pundits and opponents.

While one after another economic analysis or in-depth report on the intricacies of the political process demonstrate that Pres. Obama’s policies have done more to reduce the impact of the recession and speed recovery, backing up his rhetoric and his explanations of the economic landscape, impatience appears to be winning out, and disingenuous commentary from newsrooms and from the opposition party alike, now hinges on taking advantage of that impatience to perpetuate half-truths and misleading representations of the real meaning of measurable economic trends.

For instance, one of the most unfair and misleading statistics that has been beaten to death by pundits eager to explore Republican claims, in the interest of promoting “controversy”, is the idea that Pres. Obama claimed his recovery plan would hold unemployment to 8% or below, but yet unemployment has risen to 10% and above. While the statistics are factual, more or less, the story is told in a way that is fundamentally dishonest. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was designed to limit unemployment in a number of ways, and to create new jobs, with the goal being an upper limit of 8% on overall unemployment, but it took time to get through Congress.

When Congress finally passed the measure, unemployment was already at 8% (February 2009) and climbing fast. Another factor has come into play as well that helps unemployment figures stay higher than they would have one year ago: unemployment benefits have been extended, in order to prevent household bankruptcies and foreclosures, which means higher numbers of people on the unemployment rolls at any given time than would have been true last year.

Perhaps most importantly, unemployment appears to have peaked just over 10%, which means that 2009 has been far less bad than had been projected. So it’s really not intellectually honest criticism to claim that Obama is causing unemployment, or is failing to stop it, when the trend-lines show that in fact, his policies are working and economic recovery is underway. Job-creation is always the key lagging indicator of economic recovery, and is, in the case of this recession, even more lagging, due to the involvement of credit markets in the financial collapse.

Lending is a key aspect of job-creation, and banks have been stubbornly unwilling to resume widespread commercial and consumer-lending. Failure to provide capital to small businesses and to consumers is hampering the restoration of working capital to employers, and slowing the recovery of job growth. But ongoing, targeted stimulus programs (multiple) which are part of the overall recovery plan, are having the effect of saving, restoring and creating jobs in key areas. Recovery begins with the slowing of decline.

That has been achieved and looks to be behind us, as we now move along a tentative trend toward renewed investment in small businesses and the potential for new hiring. 2010 is also slated to see the release of another third of the recovery money, in the form of public works projects, transportation and technology investment, and tax breaks. Pres. Obama took the difficult but well-thought decision to plan for the actual sustainable recovery and not for the propaganda value of a huge cash payout to consumers, a stimulus which would have had little economic value and done little to stave off the worst effects of this deep credit-freeze.

While the president and his team of advisors deserve credit for the incredible speed with which they put together a policy response as far-reaching and complex as the ARRA (during the few months of the transition period), which has had such generally positive impact in halting economic decline and building the foundations for a sustained recovery, the media environment has turned intensely against Obama’s deliberative way of explaining facts to the public. Mass media have returned to the worst practices of 2003, when a climate of parrot-first journalism allowed lies and distortions to whip up a pro-war fever, even driving members of Congress to misread intelligence reports and join in a bandwagon mentality.

But the media find it juicier to blame Obama for something he had nothing to do with causing, as if they were expressing profound intelligence or investigative acumen for finding the words to publicly assail a political figure of such far-reaching popularity. So the juicy, the falsely controversial, the inflammatory, and even remarks verging on hate-speech or talk of armed rebellion, have glittered enough to distract the mass media from the facts, and turned them off to the tedium of reporting truthfully about the economic outlook, as evidenced by actual government and private-sector studies.

We are asked to cast aside the long-term view in favor of the immediate gratification of impatient hostility toward deliberation. We are asked to return to the politics of the self-reinforcing non-investigative news cycle, in which pundits either parrot the points of view of those whose rhetoric is the least fact-based possible, or invent their own reality, which they then reinforce with false examples.

Nevermind the shame and travesty the fourth estate endured when it was revealed that even journalists covered up evidence the intelligence on Iraq’s WMD was vague at best. Nevermind the degree to which such unenterprising journalistic work reduced the journalistic profession to a political sideshow. Nevermind that editors and television producers should be called to task for ignoring serious breaches of basic Constitutional principle in favor of the fairy tale that such things never happen in this land of unimprovable democracy.

The media appear to have learned the wrong lesson: they were widely criticized for following so obediently along with the party line of the Bush White House, so the way they regain their credibility is to prop themselves up as fearless critics of Bush’s successor. We looked like lapdogs before, so lets be something else now, and people will trust us again, as if the whole problem were a matter of posture.

The proper lesson would have been to recognize that by failing to adequately investigate the activities of the former administration, the press became an echo-chamber for lies and distortions that ultimately were harmful to democracy; then, to devote maximum energy to actually exploring the complexities and nuance of major stories, abandon the echo-chamber style of journalism and report evidentiary truths, no matter how tedious the process of explaining it may seem.

We, as a nation, should challenge the press to abandon this adolescent mindset that holds that facts involving complexity are basically uncool and not marketable, so they should be brushed aside in favor of pithy headlines which cannot be published unless they include at least one play on words. We should challenge our national media to help us understand the bewildering —and yes, sometimes very tedious— complexity of the crises facing our president, so we can decide fairly whether or not he might benefit from an extension of our support.