SOTU II: Save Obama First!

There's Mo' to SOTU! More on last night's high school assembly speech ... I mean, State of the Union Address.
 
1) Alert reader D, who has worked for two reorganized Washington agencies, confirms my fears about Obama's sweeping pledge to "reorganize the federal government."

Reorganization is a paralyzing experience.   It fixates the bureaucracy on questions of turf, and that, being something that they really care about, crowds out all thought of actual substantive work for a very long period, till every turf issue is settled.  If Obama does not know this now he’s not as smart as I think he is.  Therefore I ascribe his motives in raising this issue entirely to electoral politics, just as you do, both the money and the issue (Obama’s trying to get things DONE in Washington over Congressional — Republican — resistance) ...

A very important point is that when the executive branch reorganizes something, you have to take account of Congressional oversight responsibility.  The executive is resistant to this kind of reorganization, but the executive is as fluid as quicksilver compared to the Congress, which typically simply does nothing to its committee organization to reflect changes in the executive, and so there ends up being a perfect cacophony of Congressional influence as multiple committees oversee the work of the reorganized executive.  There’s a cooperative impact, too, as the unchanging Congressional picture is used by the executive branch bureaucrats as a major bulwark against their making any real changes in the way they operate.  It is a fool’s errand.

2) Last night Obama staked "his claim to decades of well-worn political detritus," writes Ed Kilgore, who accurately notes that the president's plans

could easily have been harvested from any number of interchangeable speeches given during the last 20 years—not just by presidents by members of Congress, governors, mayors, and CEOs—from both parties.

A brilliant move, Kilgore argues. By talking grandly and optimistically while embracing some "small familiar ideas for creating jobs and growth," Obama is

forcing the GOP to either go after Social Security and Medicare on their own—which is very perilous to a party whose base has become older voters—or demand unprecedented cuts for those popular public investments that were the centerpiece of his speech.

Kilgore's right, I think, as a matter of political strategy. If the economy keeps growing, Obama's new, comfortingly mainstream platform of familiar locker-room exhortations and familiar medium-sized plans will be hard to beat. But as a matter of governing it's fundamentally irresponsible, because it leaves to Republicans the unpopular job of cleaning up the country's fiscal mess, which means we're less likely to even make a start at it until 2013 at best. (If Obama has the electoral upper hand on the budget-cutting question, why would it make political sense for him to cut a grand deal before the election? It's more likely Republicans will back off.)

I'm not saying Obama's (and Bush's) stimulus spending and health care spending wasn't justified. I'm saying at some point soon we're supposed to bring deficits back into a normal range. Obama used to talk as if his idea was to spend in the short term and balance the budget in the long term. That's gone. Last night he sided with the left and the pollsters against significant cuts in Social Security—as Kilgore put it, he's "refused to offer Republicans the cover they crave for 'entitlement reform.'" Cutting deficits costs votes, a mistake Ronald Reagan for one learned not to make (at least not without a Social Security crisis) before coasting to a second term in 1984. In essence, the president seems to have chosen his own reelection over the nation's long-term economic security. Obama comes first. The future he is winning is his own.

Like I said, irresponsible. The New York Times editorial writers to whom he pays excessive attention won't like it ... [Almost worked up Sullivan-level gaseous outrage there. Do more-ed Thx. We're all adjusting to the changing media landscape]

3) An opening for John Edwards! Heather Mac Donald celebrates Obama's near-complete omission of any rhetoric about a "war on poverty" or "fight against alleged racial and social injustice."

Indeed, “clean energy” environmentalism has pushed out the traditional Democratic agenda of racial and urban redistribution, while illegal aliens seem to have replaced blacks as the Democrats’ favorite victims of choice.  

I'm not sure this is an improvement. We still have an unsolved poverty problem, after all, and it's not unrelated to race. Meanwhile, championing the cause of illegal immigrants won't solve our immigration problem (and will, by lowering unskilled wages, exacerbate our poverty problem) ... 7:30 p.m.

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