Everything that is wrong with the traditional media is encapsulated in the stature of David Broder as the dean of Washington punditry. Much of what is wrong with David Broder is encapsulated in his truly astonishing column from last Sunday. He began with a backhanded insult to President Obama, acknowledging the expectations everyone had, and even sort of acknowledging the president's unique strengths.
He is much smarter than his challengers in either party, better able to read the evidence and come to the right conclusions.
Which sounds sort of good, until you realize it's the setup, and that there aren't any challengers within the Democratic Party, anyway. This already creates a false tension and a false standard. No serious Democrat will challenge President Obama. It doesn't take great experience or even minimal cerebral power to figure that out. But Broder moves right on to point to the still struggling economy, which the president helped prevent collapsing altogether, while not initiating a robust recovery.
But if Obama cannot spur that growth by 2012, he is unlikely to be reelected.
Which conveniently ignores the president's greatest asset heading into 2012: the quality of the Republican field. The Republicans are a mixture of dumb, dumber, extreme, and more extreme. Mid-term elections are base elections, but presidential elections are not. And none of the leading Republican candidates is capable of inspiring beyond the Republican base. Many aren't even capable of articulating a rationale for their running. And not one will offer a coherent and plausible alternative to the Obama economic program, which moved the country in the right direction, just not far enough. Every single Republican would move the country backward. To the good old days of the still reviled Bush era. But addressing the economy is where Broder really goes off the rails. He sees two possible solutions, for the president.
One is the power of the business cycle, the tidal force that throughout history has dictated when the economy expands and when it contracts. Economists struggle to analyze this, but they almost inevitably conclude that it cannot be rushed and almost resists political command. As the saying goes, the market will go where it is going to go.
As insipid and shallow a comment about the economy as it's possible to make. Economists don't struggle at all. There is this theory called Keynesianism. By which politics revivifies an economy. Like, oh, say, during the Great Depression. As the actual economist Brad DeLong wrote, in July:
However, even a minor and hasty acquaintance with the Great Depression teaches that the belief that the government should stand back and wash its hands because the self-regulating market quickly returns to full-employment equilibrium is the most arrogant belief possible.
And even a minor and hasty acquaintance with the Great Depression teaches that having the government stand back and wash its hands is the most risky strategy conceivable.
Which the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman referred to in writing this:
The point is that while policy makers may think they’re being prudent and appropriately cautious in their responses to unemployment, there’s a good chance that they’re prudenting and cautiousing us into a long-term jobs catastrophe.
If Broder paid attention to actual economists rather than to whatever drivel passes for polite conversation at Village cocktail parties, he might be capable of substantive discussion. Apparently he doesn't, and clearly he is not. But it gets worse.
What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.
Sure. If you ignore all the economic lessons of the Twentieth Century, the only answer would have to be war. And why not? Not that Broder is actually advocating more war, no, it's just that it's the only answer. Or something.
With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.
Got that? The president should play to the extremist Republicans and warmonger just like them! And they will support him! And because the concept of Keynesianism doesn't even exist, it's the only real means of stimulating the economy. More war. Which also will have the benefit of playing well to the Democratic base, which will rally around a warmongering Democratic president. Or not. But despite a mid-term election that hinged on base turnout, alienating the Democratic base even further couldn't possibly hurt the president. Because in Broder's skewed perception of the world, not only does the Democratic base have everything wrong (despite policy results that consistently prove otherwise), it really doesn't even exist. At least not in Broder's social circle.
So, Broder isn't actually advocating a war with Iran, and he isn't bothering to analyze the intricate political dynamics of resolving problems in Iran, and he certainly isn't going to recall that American meddling in Iran has a long history of making things much worse, it's just that war is the only answer to the economy and to the president's political fortunes. And after all, what could possibly go wrong with launching wars on whims? Just look how well things worked out in Iraq and Afghanistan!