The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Help Wanted
“Police Seek Tearful Bank Robber”–headline, CTV.ca, March 5
Whence the Dither?
We never thought we’d say this, but former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has a pretty good column in today’s New York Times. It’s a tough criticism of the Obama administration but, unlike Krugman’s hundreds of anti-Bush columns, it is not a rant. Krugman is concerned that President Obama is not treating the crisis in America’s financial institutions with sufficient urgency:
Among people I talk to there’s a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama’s failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern. . . .
Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them–and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.
Krugman argues, somewhat counterintuitively, that the administration is inhibited by free-market ideology:
Officials still aren’t willing to face the facts. They don’t want to face up to the dire state of major financial institutions because it’s very hard to rescue an essentially insolvent bank without, at least temporarily, taking it over. And temporary nationalization is still, apparently, considered unthinkable.
Krugman has a Nobel Prize in Economics, so we will leave it to others of comparable expertise to evaluate his diagnosis of and prescription for the problem. Politically, however, it strikes us that he is missing the bigger picture.
Obama is a popular new president with a mandate for “change” and big partisan majorities in both houses of Congress. The public, quite understandably, is terribly nervous about the economy. If Obama had a clear plan for dealing with the current crisis–whether Krugman’s or something along different lines–surely he would have little problem generating political support for it.
The problem is that the president’s priorities lie elsewhere. Charles Krauthammer makes the point in his column today:
With our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What’s going on? “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”
And as Reuters reports from Brussels, Emanuel isn’t the only one saying it:
[Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton told young Europeans at the European Parliament that global economic turmoil provided a fresh opening. “Never waste a good crisis . . . Don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security,” she said.
Blogress Ann Althouse, an Obama supporter, remarks: “What if George Bush or Dick Cheney had said something like that openly? It’s the kind of line that people used to imagine Bush people saying in secret.”
Obama is brazenly doing what the left accused Bush of: cynically using the first major crisis of his presidency as an excuse to pursue his own ideological agenda. But as evidenced by the lack of major terror attacks on U.S. territory since 2001, Bush at least did what was necessary to answer the immediate crisis. Even Paul Krugman acknowledges Obama has fallen short on that score.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
