Hope & History Rhyme

Elections have consequences. President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.

The budget will, among other things, come as a huge relief to Democrats who were starting to feel a bit of postpartisan depression. The stimulus bill that Congress passed may have been too weak and too focused on tax cuts. The administration’s refusal to get tough on the banks may be deeply disappointing. But fears that Mr. Obama would sacrifice progressive priorities in his budget plans, and satisfy himself with fiddling around the edges of the tax system, have now been banished.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/opinion/27krugman.html

By HAROLD MEYERSON

The Washington Post 

In March of 2004, a few days before the Illinois Democratic senatorial primary, I wrote a column for this page headlined “A Bright Hope in Illinois.” It was, I believe, the first column for a daily newspaper outside Illinois devoted to a rising young pol named Barack Obama. Bolstered by polling that showed Obama to be the clear leader in the race, I fearlessly predicted that he’d become Illinois’ next senator and quoted the assessment of Jan Schakowsky, the Democratic member of Congress from Chicago’s Gold Coast district, that Obama would “march right onto the national stage and the international stage.”

Well! Thus buoyed by my undisputed status as a kingmaker in Illinois politics (undisputed, I acknowledge, because it’s never been asserted), I write today about another of the state’s Democrat, this one a candidate in Tuesday’s special primary election for the overwhelmingly Democratic congressional district in Chicago’s North Side that until recently was represented by Rahm Emanuel. As events would have it, this candidate has a lot in common with Obama. Both are Harvard Law grads. Both have authored notable books. Both worked on behalf of unemployed steelworkers: Obama as a community organizer, this candidate as a lawyer who won 2,500 of them their pensions after their employer refused to pay up. And both have politically problematic names.

Little about Tom Geoghegan resembles Ronald Reagan, but his hard-to-decipher last name rhymes with the former president’s. A wry, heterodox liberal intellectual with a lifelong passion for American workers, Geoghegan first burst on to the literary and political scene with a great, slightly crazed ode to Chicago — in the best tradition of Hecht, Algren and Bellow — that ran in the New Republic in the 1980s and then with his 1991 book “Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back,” which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has since written four other books, some on the shambles that is the American legal system. He’s became the go-to lawyer for Chicagoans who’ve lost their jobs through discrimination or who’ve been denied the pay they’ve earned. And now, he’s the congressional candidate who supports single-payer health care, expanding Social Security to compensate for the decimation of private pensions, and government investment to rebuild our offshored manufacturing sector.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/24/AR2009022403017.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

By DAVID LEONHARDT

The New York Times

The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters.

The Obama budget — a bold, even radical departure from recent history, wrapped in bureaucratic formality and statistical tables — would sharply raise taxes on the rich, beyond where Bill Clinton had raised them. It would reduce taxes for everyone else, to a lower point than they were under either Mr. Clinton or George W. Bush. And it would lay the groundwork for sweeping changes in health care and education, among other areas.

More than anything else, the proposals seek to reverse the rapid increase in economic inequality over the last 30 years. They do so first by rewriting the tax code and, over the longer term, by trying to solve some big causes of the middle-class income slowdown, like high medical costs and slowing educational gains.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/business/economy/27policy.html

By JACKIE CALMES

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Proclaiming a “once in a generation” opportunity, President Obama proposed a 10-year budget on Thursday that reflects his determination in the face of recession to invest trillions of dollars and his own political capital in reshaping the nation’s priorities.

He would overhaul health care, begin to arrest global warming, expand the federal role in education and shift more costs to some corporations and the wealthiest taxpayers.

In a veiled gibe at the Bush years, Mr. Obama said his budget breaks “from a troubled past” and attributed the current economic maelstrom to “an era of profound irresponsibility that engulfed both private and public institutions from some of our largest companies’ executive suites to the seats of power in Washington, D.C.”

Without trimming his ambitious campaign promises, the president projects a budget for the 2010 fiscal year of nearly $3.6 trillion. He says he would shrink annual deficits, now at levels not seen in six decades, mostly through higher revenue from rich individuals and polluting industries, by reducing war costs and by assuming a rate of economic growth by 2010 that private forecasters and even some White House advisers consider overly rosy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/politics/27web-budget.html

DJABAL REFUGEE CAMP, Chad

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

The New York Times

After Barack Obama was elected president in November, the Darfur refugees here were so thrilled that they erupted in spontaneous dancing and singing.

Soon afterward, the refugees renamed the School No. 1 in this dusty camp the Obama School. It’s a pathetic building of mud bricks with a tin roof, and the windows are holes in the walls, but it’s caulked with hope that President Obama may help end the long slaughter and instability in Sudan.

Soon we’ll see whether those hopes are justified. Next Wednesday, the International Criminal Court is expected to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity in Darfur.

That would be historic — the first time the court has called for the arrest of a sitting head of state. It would be the clearest assertion that in the 21st century, mass murder is no longer a ruler’s prerogative.

There has been concern that Mr. Bashir will lash out by expelling aid workers or that Sudan’s fragile north-south peace agreement will become unglued if Mr. Bashir is ousted. Those fears are overblown. Time and again, Mr. Bashir has responded to pressure and scrutiny by improving his behavior and increasing his cooperation with the United Nations and Western countries.

It’s true that the slogan “save Darfur” should be reconceived as “save Sudan.” North and South Sudan are probably on track to a resumption of their brutal civil war that killed two million people until a fragile peace in 2005. But while saving Sudan raises immensely knotty, difficult challenges, President Bashir is part of the problem, and accountability is part of the solution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/opinion/26kristof.html

By PETER BAKER

The New York Times 

WASHINGTON — It had all the trappings of a State of the Union address but since technically it was not, President Obama did not have to utter those traditional words: “The state of our union is strong.” Because, frankly, it isn’t.

This was the year that pretense and pride fell by the wayside and the president reported to the nation that things have skidded wildly off course. Then over the course of nearly an hour, Mr. Obama sought to convince an angry, anxious America that a moment of crisis is actually a time for expanding aspirations, not shrinking horizons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/us/politics/25assess.html

By DAVID IGNATIOUS

The Washington Post 

It was a moment that Franklin D. Roosevelt would have savored in 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression — the president gesturing to the gallery of the House of Representatives and quoting a high school student from South Carolina: “We are not quitters.”

No, sir! No way. Not Tuesday night. For the first time in his presidency, Barack Obama was truly presidential, finding a language and a cadence to speak to a country that has become paralyzed by the economic decline.

Before the speech, even the nation’s most tough-minded investors were saying that the best hope for the economy was that Obama would sprinkle some political magic. His policies hadn’t stemmed the decline; the massive $787 stimulus package was criticized even by its supporters as a grab-bag, and his financial recovery plan sent the stock market plummeting. But perhaps the president, the Orator in Chief, could turn it around.

The big asset in our depleted national bank right now is Obama himself. And to this listener, at least, he delivered a big tranche of what the bankers and boardroom titans have failed to provide over the past year, which is leadership. That won’t be enough to offset all the bad news that’s still ahead, but it was a start.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/02/we_are_not_quitters.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Capital Journal by GERALD F. SEIB 

The Wall Street Journal 

Every day staffers bring President Barack Obama about 10 letters picked from the blizzard the White House regularly receives, so he can get a sampling of the economic grief average citizens are describing.

Tuesday night, in his first address to a joint session of Congress, Mr. Obama was talking more to those letter-writers beyond the Capitol than to the lawmakers arrayed before him.

Confronted with dire economic conditions, the president faced a choice between making his big speech a Bill Clinton-like policy manifesto or a Franklin Roosevelt-like fireside chat. He chose the latter.

His speech wasn’t much designed to sell lawmakers on an economic-stimulus plan — which, after all, they already have passed — or to explain to them the details of a budget plan they have yet to see.

Instead, it was structured above all to convince average Americans that all the pieces of his recovery plan really do fit together. Thus, the president told the residents of Main Street why they should want Wall Street rescued, despite the anger they feel toward bankers and financiers. He sought to reassure the good people of America that bad people won’t be rewarded with tax dollars for irresponsible behavior.

And — belatedly, in the eyes of Mr. Obama’s critics — his remarks were designed to tell Americans it’s OK to be optimistic. One of the great questions hanging over the speech beforehand was which Barack Obama would show up to deliver it: the lyrical maestro of hope from the presidential campaign, or the more recent grim prognosticator of tough times ahead.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123553433728567427.html