Poor Cass Sunstein. The White House's regulatory czar proudly took the results of his four-month-long regulatory review to the op-ed page of the right-wing Wall Street Journal and a presentation at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, expecting, what? love? - and got a contemptuous pummeling instead:
Sunstein announced that 30 government agencies have identified hundreds of rules whose elimination or improvement could save the private sector millions of hours of paperwork and billions of dollars.
At the Journal, the commenters were more than a little skeptical.
"What nonsense. This is just another head fake from the Administration. They try to sound like Reagan but act like old Soviet style central planners. No one with a brain is buying it," read one typical response....
Sunstein's words had little effect on business leaders, who remain suspicious and hostile of the Obama crowd.
While the administration's recommendations are "a small step" in the right direction, wrote Bill Kovacs, who oversees regulatory affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "they appear to have sidestepped the fundamental issues of cost and burden that have Republicans and Democrats alike clamoring for long-term regulatory reform."
more...
Progressive critics noted that after eight years of an aggressive anti-regulatory agenda from the Bush administration, there was a lot of regulatory ground to be made up. Instead of trying to pander to a right-wing, corporatist, and rabidly anti-regulatory audience, the Obama White House should be to trying to better protect public health and safety, not just trying to eliminate regulation for its own sake in a hopeless attempt to win over political opponents.
Sunstein "once again deployed the kind of anti-regulatory rhetoric one might expect from the Chamber of Commerce," Amy Sinden, a Temple University law professor, wrote in a blog post for the Center for Progressive Reform. The White House's "pandering to industry on this issue is in danger of doing long-term damage to the important business of protecting Americans from a variety of hazards."
Another critic was Celeste Monforton, who teaches public health at George Washington University. She is fresh off the independent investigation team that last week released a scathing report about the safety violations that caused the 2010 explosion at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia.
"One of the many things that we found was there was kind of a sense there that some of the paperwork things that mine operators have to do are burdensome, are unnecessary, have no value...
"But the whole benefit and value of doing those activities -- which generate paperwork -- was completely lost on some of the men who were doing it.... I believe that's related to this longstanding, very destructive rhetoric on paperwork and the burdens of paperwork."
"So when I read Cass Sunstein's Wall Street Journal op-ed today, and the very, very first example he gives of absurd, burdensome paperwork is an OSHA -- a worker safety agency -- regulation, I find that extremely disturbing, and wonder if Mr. Sunstein read our report," she said.
Why do they persist in doing this? Ignore the values and policy directions desired by those who voted for them and instead pursue - in word and deed - those who hate them, spurn them, and will never support them politically, no matter how much they kowtow? After all, there already is a party that has as one of its bedrock principles shrinking government to the point where it can be drowned in the bathtub, leaving business to do whatever the heck it wants, the protection of the citizenry be damned. There already is such a party. They're called the Republicans. And no one who believes in what they believe will be fooled by an imitator - they'll vote for the real thing every time.
So, Obama White House, how about giving up on courting the right-wingers and just focusing on doing the right thing? You have a base that has some expectations that need to be fulfilled, and a country that needs protecting after an eight-year-long thirty-year-long rampage of rapaciousness by a business sector that cares for little beyond its bottom line.
Really, Republicans aren't going to love you no matter what you do. So don't keep chasing after them and forgetting the ones that brung ya.