Noonan why obama will lose

The latter choice would leave Rice free to be White House chief of staff. Biden could send Pete Buttigieg to the United Nations and put Washington state governor Jay Inslee, whose single-issue presidential campaign on climate policy everyone ignored, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency.

As the list of nominations grows through December and January, there would be a sense that competence was once again welcome in the Oval Office. Biden has always depicted himself as a unifier, determined to rise above faction in a chronically polarized country. Making Kamala Harris, who did her best to hurt him in Democratic primary debates, his vice presidential running mate fits that brand.

Simply by having a transition plan, Biden would mark a clean break from his predecessor. The U. The entire senior management echelon at highly technical government departments like Agriculture and Energy serves at the pleasure of the president. Every administration names up to 6, senior bureaucrats, very few with particularly partisan tasks. Beginning the day after an election, parking lots are held clear in dozens of government buildings, waiting for the new team to arrive for briefings.

But after Trump was elected they never arrived. Trump sent, among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. A Biden presidency will mark a re-professionalization of the apparatus of the American state. People who know about product safety will be in charge of product safety.

Diplomats will be ambassadors. Nuclear physicists will watch over nuclear power plants. Sometimes the most important changes are the least noticed. But if a preference for competence as a hiring criterion were enough to fix all that ails America, then the Obama presidency would have rendered a Trump presidency impossible. America was already deeply challenged before Trump won Florida, and very few of the threats facing the country will go away even if Trump does.

A still-virulent coronavirus pandemic will still be killing hundreds of Americans a day in January. Of course such advice could also be applied to the left-leaning group that was quick to blame Republican budget decisions for the Ebola outbreak in a television advert with the tagline "Republican cuts kill".

As a Bloomberg View editorial notes, neither side is covering itself with glory here. At this point the jury's still out on whether the US government's handling of the Ebola crisis will - at last, for real this time! Meanwhile thousands in Africa continue to die. The only thing that seems clear in the US is that the word "Katrina" has become established political shorthand for toxic government incompetence, just as any noteworthy scandal gets a "-gate" suffix.

How has that not caught on yet? With 18 days to the elections, there's still time. Campaign advert politicises Ebola. US Ebola 'blunder' stokes anger. There are many reasons for this. The blindly partisan will be only too happy to let him stew in it. Youth is supposed to bring vigor and vision. In general, however, I think we find in our modern political figures that what it really brings is need — for greatness, to be transformative, to leave a legacy.

Such clamorous needs! How very boring they are, how puny and small, but how huge in their consequences. What Mr. Obama needed the past 18 months was a wise man — more on that later — to offer counsel and perspective, a guy who just by walking into the room brings historical context. Stop that, focus like a laser beam on the economy. Whatever you gotta do to get some Republicans on board you do it, bow to what they need. Skip to header Skip to main content Skip to footer Winners. Fred Harper.

Read a Q and A with Peggy Noonan on the next page. Q and A Peggy Noonan usually likes to let her column speak for itself.

Q : Do you consider yourself a partisan? Read the best of Peggy Noonan on the next page. Winners World Extras. Qatar to reportedly represent U. Unemployment would rise above nine per cent unless a significant stimulus plan was passed.

The estimates were getting worse by the day. Summers informed Obama that the government was already spending well beyond its means. Obama would need resources to save G. Obama was told that, regardless of his policies, the deficits would likely be blamed on him in the long run. The forecasts were frightening, and jeopardized his ambitious domestic agenda, which had been based on unrealistic assumptions made during the campaign. The consequence would be the largest run-up in the debt since World War II.

There was an obvious tension between the warning about the extent of the financial crisis, which would require large-scale spending, and the warning about the looming federal budget deficits, which would require fiscal restraint. Christina Romer, the incoming chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, drafted the stimulus material. A Berkeley economist, she was new to government. Peter Orszag, the incoming budget director, was a relentless advocate of fiscal restraint.

He was well known in Washington policy circles as a deficit hawk. Orszag insisted that there were mechanical limits to how much money the government could spend effectively in two years. In the Summers memo, he contributed sections about historic deficits and the need to scale back campaign promises. The Romer-Orszag divide was the start of a rift inside the Administration that continued for the next two years.

Since , some economists have insisted that the stimulus was too small. White House defenders have responded that a larger stimulus would not have moved through Congress. Summers advised the President that a larger stimulus could actually make things worse. The markets that Summers warned Obama about have been calm. Summers also presumed that the Administration could go back to Congress for more. Obama accepted the advice.

This view—that Congress would serve as a partner to a popular new President trying to repair the economy—proved to be wrong. At a meeting in Chicago on December 16th to discuss the memo, Obama did not push for a stimulus larger than what Summers recommended.

They would cost too much, and not do enough good in the short term. The most effective ideas were less sexy, such as sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the dozens of states that were struggling with budget crises of their own.

By late January, , the bill had cleared the House without a single Republican vote, and was stuck in the Senate, where the reception from the right was also antagonistic. He had replaced the smart grid with a request for twenty billion dollars in funding for high-speed trains. But including that request was risky.

To find the extra money—forty billion to satisfy the senators and twenty billion for Obama—the President needed to cut sixty billion dollars from the bill. He was given two options: he could demand that Congress remove a seventy-billion-dollar tax provision that was worthless as a stimulus but was important to the House leadership, or he could cut sixty billion dollars of highly stimulative spending.

He decided on the latter. Even as the severity of the economic crisis became clear, Obama and Congress worked together to make the stimulus smaller. It turned out that the ideological divide he had set out to bridge was not just a psychodrama.

Each night, an Obama aide hands the President a binder of documents to review. After his wife goes to bed, at around ten, Obama works in his study, the Treaty Room, on the second floor of the White House residence. President Bush preferred oral briefings; Obama likes his advice in writing. He marks up the decision memos and briefing materials with notes and questions in his neat cursive handwriting.

In the morning, each document is returned to his staff secretary. A single Presidential comment might change a legislative strategy, kill the proposal of a well-meaning adviser, or initiate a bureaucratic process to answer a Presidential question. If the document is a decision memo, its author usually includes options for Obama to check at the end. The formatting is simple, but the decisions are not. As Obama told the Times , early in his first term, Presidents are rarely called on to make the easy choices.

On February 5, , just as Obama was negotiating the final details of the stimulus package, Summers and Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, drafted a memo to the President outlining a plan to save the collapsing banks.

Obama would need congressional support if he pursued nationalization. Geithner and Summers recommended that, if necessary, the F. The F. The plan was dropped in mid-March after a scandal erupted over lucrative bonuses paid to executives at A. But the judgment of the political advisers prevailed. For the second time in as many months, a more aggressive course of action on the economy was thwarted by fears of congressional disapproval.

Obama began to subtly adjust his domestic strategy. Even as he fought the recession, he had decided to pursue health-care reform as well, and during the spring he had to make a series of decisions about the legislation.

Its fate in the Senate was largely in the hands of Max Baucus, of Montana, the chairman of the Finance Committee, which had jurisdiction over much of the bill. Baucus and several other key Senate Democrats opposed reconciliation, and Republicans decried its use on such major legislation as a partisan power grab.

By the spring, Republicans had settled on a simple and effective plan of attack against Obama. Senate campaign without ever having a single negative television advertisement aired about him, began to feel the effects of an energized opposition. As his approval rating declined through , he looked for ways to restore his credibility as a moderate.

He became intent on responding to critics of government spending and, as White House memos show, he settled into the role of a more transactional and less transformational leader. They responded that he could publicly ask the attendees for a continued dialogue on the best way to address the fiscal crisis or he could create a fiscal task force that would tackle the issue comprehensively. They warned him that among Democrats who then ran the House and the Senate there was resistance to the task force.