On the Economy: “Hopefully things will turn around despite the financial experts and politicians”

Note: In the interest of confidentiality, I’ve changed the names of an acquaintance and a friend who are quoted in the following post.

With all the spin emanating from the Axelrod PR machine on the Obama stimulus plan and the counter spin from congressional leaders, you’d think the American people were lying supine in their beds awaiting rescue by our national heroes, um, I mean leaders.

Encounters in my daily life this week with a couple of representatives of the fabled middle class tell a different story.

As I was carrying my groceries in the other day, I stopped to chat with Mike, a member of the maintenance team at my apartment building. Mike is always on the run, and it’s a rare occasion when he’ll pause to answer a question with more than a brief yes or no. Today, he looked up only once or twice from his work to commiserate with me on the high cost of food: I’d just paid $84.00 for a couple of bags of groceries.

“Remember the excuse when supermarket prices started to go up?” I asked. They blamed it all on the price of gas. Last time I checked, gas was selling for $1.49 a gallon.”

“Yeah,” Mike said, “But once they raise the price of groceries, they never go down again.”

A family man in his mid-forties, Mike explained how he and his wife are meeting the challenge. He said, “We go grocery shopping about every three months for whatever we can buy in bulk. We make trips in between for milk and stuff like that. That way we save quite a bit of money.”

He went on to say he and a friend were each going to buy half a cow to put meat in the freezer for the coming months. He said they might also buy a hog.

“That’s what ya gotta do to survive these days,” he said.

I’ve no doubt that Mike and his wife and kids will survive the recession, depression, or whatever you want to call it.

In another heartening exchange, I got an email from my friend Fred, who is about the same age as Mike. Fred is also married but he and Joanne have no children.

Fred wrote:

“This year I think will be a challenge. We've been taking stock of all

of our assets & debt and trying to work up a survival plan. It's a lot of work but necessary, we should be able to weather the downturn ok though. Hopefully things will turn around despite the financial experts and politicians.”

Well said: “Hopefully things will turn around despite the financial experts and politicians.”

Although Fred and Joanne have not been threatened by foreclosure on their mortgage, Fred is taking a leadership role in their neighborhood to assist others less fortunate. He writes:

“Tomorrow I have a meeting with a Community Organizer. I've been tossing around an idea about how to deal with some of the foreclosed properties in our neighborhood. Eventually our next-door neighbor suggested I contact an individual that they have worked with. I emailed her and she was very interested in my ideas. They have a program that recruits and promotes neighborhood leaders that might be an option but she wanted to talk in person before heading down that road. So we'll see tomorrow where it goes. They’d have to have some pretty hefty resources if my plan is to work but it could be a good thing for everyone if it works.”

In light of the above, let me be the first to admit that community organizers have their place.

There’s no question that we desperately need a stimulus plan for the sake of all those who are already unemployed or who have lost their homes during this downturn. Hopefully, it will stop the hemorrhaging of jobs, create new jobs, and rebuild the infrastructure as promised.

In the meantime, I’m sure there are many Americans like Mike and Fred who are using common sense and wisdom to weather the crisis - despite the financial experts and politicians.

Obama’s Top Political Aides Transplanting Campaign Tactics to Policy Arena

An article titled Obama Uses Poll, Focus Groups to Sell Stimulus Plan to Congress, by Bloomberg’s Lorraine Woellert and Hans Nichols, confirms one of my worst fears about the incoming Obama Administration.

Woellert and Nichols write:

“President-elect Barack Obama’s top political aides are transplanting their campaign tactics to the policy arena, using data from polls and focus groups to shape the debate over a stimulus plan that may cost at least $775 billion.

“David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political adviser, along with campaign media adviser Jim Margolis, are encouraging lawmakers to use the word “recovery” instead of recession, and “investment” instead of “infrastructure.” Those recommendations came from focus-group research indicating that such framing would make the package more appealing to voters.

‘“The Obama camp is trying to build support for the stimulus proposals, which have encountered resistance from lawmakers of both parties over size and cost. Republicans have employed similar tactics in past policy debates, notably when they labeled the estate tax as the “death” tax in arguing for its repeal.”’

In previous posts, I’ve highlighted commonalities of President Bush and President-elect Obama. Now it appears that 11 days before he takes office, Obama is already following in the footsteps of his predecessor by confusing campaigning with governing; arguably one of the major reasons for the Bush Administration’s many failures.

With Karl Rove, his chief campaign strategist at his side in the White House, President Bush never learned the difference between campaigning and governing.

(You may remember that my concern for the president-elect’s kinship with Dubya heightened with the announcement that Obama was taking Rove’s counterpart, David Axelrod, along with him to the White House.)

Here’s a flashback to the early days of Bush’s second term:

On May 20, 2005, the Washington Post’s Peter Baker wrote:

‘“The obligatory campaign-style signs were hung behind the stage, the familiar hand-selected "conversation participants" seated next to him. The friendly, invitation-only audience cheered with appropriate enthusiasm. And when President Bush took the microphone, he spun out more or less the same speech he has given dozens of times before.

“On the 78th day of a 60-day road show, the president's nationwide Social Security tour, even to some of his own aides, has the feel of a past-its-prime Broadway production that has been held over while other, newer shows steal the spotlight.

‘“I'm just beginning this debate," Bush said in an appearance at the Milwaukee Art Museum, his 32nd Social Security event this year. "I'm going to spend whatever time it takes to continue traveling this country and make it absolutely clear to the people, we've got a problem.”’

The rest is history. Bush’s Social Security initiative failed.

In the Bloomberg piece, Woellert and Nichols quote Dick Morris, pollster for the Clinton Administration:

“We polled everything, every policy initiative, everything you can think of,” Morris said. “It’s become pretty standard.”

‘“By contrast, President George W. Bush “didn’t really poll policy, he polled the presentation.”’

As to whether Obama would follow the Clinton or Bush model, Woellert and Nichols report that Morris said, “My guess is that Obama will {be} more like Clinton than Bush.”

That would be the same Clinton that Obama and team denigrated throughout the Democratic primary.

But for the sake of America’s suffering people, let’s hope that however Axelrod, et al, decide to frame it, the much-needed stimulus plan, appropriately reviewed and amended by Congress, will be passed in a timely fashion.