As the Economy Sinks, a Do-Nothing President

Last Friday morning, as the latest terrible jobs report came out, here were the recent contents on the White House website dedicated to the issue of jobs. There was a post on how small businesses can get on the federal grant gravy train. There were four or five posts by West Wing celebrities on how they got their first jobs. And a few hours after the dismal employment report came out, up went a post on…female entrepreneurs.

Interspersed in there was some hand-wringing about the report—“Problems in the job market were long in the making and will not be solved overnight,” wrote Council of Economic Advisors Chair Alan Krueger—but the website conveyed the basic truth about this administration. Not only does the Obama team not have, as it has never had, a plan to deal with the Great Recession; it also has no motivation to take action now in the face of economic stoppage. As the economy sinks into the 1%-growth range, if not recession, we’ve got a do-nothing president. In an election year.

Pretty weird stuff. Now, Obama is trying to cast things the other way.  He says we’ve got a do-nothing Congress. He has what he calls a “jobs bill” which has been on offer since last fall. On its face it’s a collection of half-measures and penny-ante Keynesianism: tax credits for small businesses, tax increases on multinationals (no kidding), a veterans’ jobs corps, that sort of thing. The president did zero last fall to build up support in Congress for this rubber chicken. All he said—all he boomed—was “PASS THIS BILL!” In other words, the “jobs bill” was never meant as serious legislation—only a rhetorical crutch to cover up the administration’s lack of a program and absence of initiative.

We’ve never seen anything quite like this. When Democrat Harry Truman coined the term “do-nothing Congress” for his 1948 campaign, that Republican Congress really wasn’t doing nothing. It just wasn’t doing Truman’s bidding. In April of that year, Congress passed a tax cut over Truman’s veto, and that was more than enough to power the economy forward so that the incumbent Truman won re-election in the fall.

In the spring of 1980, as inflation was running at 20% per annum (no misprint), President Carter cajoled the Federal Reserve into a series of measures that basically disallowed bank lending, crashing the economy into recession. Comically bad action on the president’s part (and soon rescinded), to be sure, but action in the heat of a re-election fight all the same.

Here however is a president who presides over an economy as sluggish as in anyone’s memory, and who is content to confront the situation with bromides and politically correct minutiae.

The other day, apparently, the president remarked to some Jewish visitors to the White House that he “knows more” about Judiasm than any other president, and the reason is that he’s been reading about it. Reading? So the president does have some intellectual initiative after all. He’s been soaking up words on the Chosen People. Yet it was only four years ago that George W. Bush got a little killed in the press when Karl Rove reported that the president was spending time reading books. If Obama is reading, following his curiosities from here to there, where is his initiative to get himself educated on the central fact that has confronted his presidency since day one: the economic crisis?

Apparently, and this is such a common middlebrow Keynesian presumption, the president believes that final wisdom on economics has been achieved. Tax, spend, and regulate will work, if only the obscurantists, such as in Congress, would get out of the way.

There is more than an off chance that the Dow Industrials will leap a thousand points should the Supreme Court invalidate Obamacare in a few weeks. That might be enough to carry Obama to victory in November, irony of ironies. But you know what happened to the American economy after it re-elected Harry Truman in 1948, on the strength of the economic resurgence that came from Republican action he had unsuccessfully vetoed a few months before? Recession in 1949.