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Hear, hear!
Sincerely,
*Blame Bill Clinton.*
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/us...ef=todayspaper
WASHINGTON — As President Obama struggles to turn around the moribund economy and confront multiple international issues, he wastes few opportunities to remind the country that the problems are not of his making.
“The financial crisis this administration inherited is still creating painful challenges for businesses and families alike,” Mr. Obama said this week as he proposed spending limits.
“We inherited a financial crisis unlike any that we’ve seen in our time,” he said last week as he thrust General Motors into bankruptcy.
His advisers and allies follow the same script. “The Obama administration inherited a situation at Guantánamo that was intolerable,” James L. Jones, the national security adviser, said of the military prison in Cuba. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton defended the Obama foreign policy in the same vein. “We inherited a lot of problems,” she said.
Mr. Obama is hardly the first president to point to his predecessor. Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter for the poor economy he inherited, just as Bill Clinton blamed the first President Bush and the younger Mr. Bush then blamed Mr. Clinton. Former Bush aides like Karl Rove argue that Mr. Obama has done it more extensively and routinely than other presidents have, although the Obama team denies that.
But at a certain point, a new president assumes ownership of the problems and finds himself answering for his own actions. For Mr. Obama, even some advisers say that moment may be coming soon.
Mr. Obama got a taste of that in recent days as he and his White House were put on the defensive trying to explain why the unemployment rate had risen to 9.4 percent when his staff had predicted it would peak at 8 percent as long as Congress passed his stimulus plan, which lawmakers dutifully did. Mr. Obama obviously did not create the recession passed to him, but it was his administration that set the expectation that his policy would keep it from deepening as far as it has.
Challenges stacking up overseas may increasingly be seen as Mr. Obama’s soon enough too, say advisers, critics and some outside experts. By sending an extra 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and replacing the commander there, Mr. Obama has now made that war his, as many analysts in Washington see it. The forceful position toward Israel that Mr. Obama has adopted in recent weeks over settlement expansion may also make the Palestinian conflict more and more his own problem.
“I think they’ve got till summer” until these issues become fully vested with Mr. Obama, said Ed Gillespie, a former White House counselor to Mr. Bush. “But the novelty’s already starting to wear off.”
Like many other former Bush aides, Mr. Gillespie bristles at the fingers pointed at his onetime boss. “Blaming Bush just is not going to resonate” soon, he said. “And it’s not what people are looking for in their president. They’re looking for somebody who’s not blaming somebody but is going to solve problems.”
David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said the White House was not trying to shift blame with its frequent invocation of the “inheritance” it had from Mr. Bush, but to seek public patience for policies that may require months and in some cases years to pay dividends.
“Whatever problems he inherited walking in the door, they’re his responsibility now,” Mr. Axelrod said. “Nobody’s trying to duck responsibility or make excuses for them. But it is important at times to put it into perspective, not to fix blame but to underscore that some of these problems are complex and they’re going to take time to solve.”
Analysts and historians say presidents can usually deflect fault in this way until their own policies have time to take effect.
“When a president tries new policies to deal with old problems and then new policies appear to be failed policies, then he owns it,” said George C. Edwards III, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. “That’s the challenge for a president.”
David Winston, a Republican strategist, said that could happen even when people began to question whether those new policies were working. That is one reason the White House has pushed hard in recent days to make the case that its expansive spending program is beginning to show results even as it tries to reassure the public that it will rein in the spiraling budget deficit.
The spurt of public events came as the latest employment numbers showed that job losses were slowing even though the unemployment rate continued to rise.
Mr. Obama and his advisers assert that the $787 billion stimulus package enacted in February has already created or saved 150,000 jobs and will create or save 600,000 more this summer. But hundreds of thousands of jobs are still disappearing each month, and White House claims about “saved” jobs are hard to do ent.
The White House was forced to explain why its stimulus plan did not stop unemployment from rising above 8 percent, as it said in January that it would. White House economists said that forecast was consistent with independent predictions at the time and did not account for just how deep the recession really was in the last quarter of last year — in other words, under Mr. Bush.
“The recession just turned out to be deeper than was predicted,” Mr. Axelrod said.
Without the Obama plan, the White House argued, it would be even worse today.
At the same time, one by one Mr. Obama is effectively assuming ownership of the foreign policy issues he found when he took over from Mr. Bush. Some are easier than others to continue blaming his predecessor for. As North Korea defies Mr. Obama, he can point out that Pyongyang developed its nuclear weapons on Mr. Bush’s watch.
But on other issues, Mr. Obama is clearly applying his own imprint, and will get credit if it succeeds and criticism if it does not. The most obvious example of that is Afghanistan, where he has increased troop levels far beyond what Mr. Bush had in the field and ousted the previous military commander.
“At that point I really think Afghanistan became Obama’s war,” said John A. Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, a research organization founded by national security specialists who now work in the Obama administration. “When you choose your commander, you are accepting full responsibility.”
Hear, hear!
Sincerely,
*Blame Bill Clinton.*
I liked Bill Clinton.
So is the NY TImes good or bad Darrins? You either find them a credible source or not? Which is it?
(redacted)
Last edited by Winehole23; 06-12-2009 at 02:17 PM.
He owns what he inherited.
Oh, I'd love to have a few drinks with the guy, but cannot stand him as President. There's a big difference between liking someone and thinking they are good at a particular job. I simply think he sucked as President.
Still blaming Clinton?
It's getting old.
I'd settle for another 8 years of the guy if we could have that economy back. The current regime is adding fuel to an already out of control fire.
that economy is one of the causes of the fires.
You know something is wrong when you're a liberal Democrat and the NY Times is bashing you.
yeah because god knows Bush had nothing to do with the you're in now... I mean DAMN! its already been like 130 days since Obama took office. That should be more than enough to fix the maelstrom of that incompetent left behind... yeah, this is in no way Bush's fault.
that argument might have been fine At The Beginning of his term...
However, the complaint now is that he is probably making things worse rather than better.
If he serves one term, we're about 9% through it. If it's two terms, 4.5%. I'd say we were still at the beginning.
Similarly if you serve 100 years, your first 5 years is only 5%, yet 5 years is a lot of time to get something done. It all depends on how you look at it.
130 days. Unless you are an insect of some sort with a lifespan measured in weeks, that isn't a lot of time.
You know, whenever I've been on the verge of financial ruin, I've always found that the best way out of it is to borrow and spend like crazy.
How did it work out?
Evidently, you're not picking up on my sarcasm.
I've never seen anything approaching serious thought from you.
Why do the ones partly responsible for creating the problems we are in today get to say when someone else 'owns' them?
Because that's the way the game is played. The president owns everything. If everything goes well he gets credit if not he gets the blame.
You don't have any grounds to complain about it because your doing the same thing by blaming Bush for the economic woes. Truth be told the ones responsible for the state of the economy are the american people. Bush didn't force americans to do this to themselves...
or this...
Obama didn't have anything to do with it either and I don't think there is much he can really do about it except hope for another bubble. But he's the man in charge and the one who said he would make it all better so now he gets the blame for it... or will before too long. I don't think the american people are suddenly going to start taking the blame for their own actions. Chalk it up to bad timing.
It was enough time to deepen the economic hole we're in.
Point is, anyone can blame and criticize. Everyone of us does it. Let's hope President Obama can actually do something about it, and fast.
Deepen the economic hole? My 401K balance, as a whole, is up like ~9% this year. Doesn't seem like the hole is getting deeper to me....
How about GDP growth? Not to mention that you only need to go back a few more months to see a significant decline in your 401k. Lest we forget the trillions the Fed created out of thin air within the last 9 months, and the trillions added to the national debt. This is a hole which will be with us for a while. Though it's certainly a bipartisan affair. Of course, we'll have continuous partisan sniping about it instead of a realization that this is truly an extraordinary event which will probably last a bit longer than conventional wisdom would have it.
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