Wait a second, just wait - has Obama pulled a clever move on me here? His budget seems way too ambitious - in flush times it would seem aggressive, but in current malaise seems down right suicidal - and maybe that's it: he has no expectation of most of his proposals to go anywhere, he in fact doesn't want to even get to try, he wants most of it to be gutted by congress - he then gets to look like he tried to be the great progressive his base yearns for, can blame failures on congress and then is free to pursue a rationally moderate course. Is it possible he's that good a Machievellian? It's a thought - remember, he plans on paying for most of this left wing largesse by assuming the economy's gonna grow at a rate absolutely no one is expecting - is it really credible to believe they're that naive?

Now, don't think when you get right down to it he'd play such a risky game of subterfuge - still, not entirely implausible. Remember, Clinton, under much more favourable economic conditions, had a somewhat ambitiously progressive agenda to begin with and after two years was humbled and forced to moderate and still went on to win a landslide victory in '96 - so certainly plausible that Obama is scheming along those lines. Still, my gut feeling is that he sees himself as the hero of a progressive revolution in America, he imagines that future generations of Democrats will lionize him the way Republicans lionize Reagan and that he and his advisers judge the current economic crisis to be a gift horse whose mouth they decidedly have no intention of peering into.

[story in Politico this morning suggests that both my above suggestions are right - they believe the time is ripe to push through a liberal agenda by leveraging a populist backlash against Wall Street and rich people and they think if they don't really get what they want they can just blame it on congress and get credit for trying. Probably lots of potential pitfalls here but biggest one just outlined by business leader on CNBC: the budget will not incentivize private capital to get back in the market, in fact will have exact opposite effect. You may find whoever runs against Obama in 2012 will be borrowing Clinton's famous tagline from 1992: It's the economy, stupid]

Ha! So nice to be proved right - opinion polls indicate that support for Hamas in Gaza is up since end of war and that if they manage to secure large release of prisoners in exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier then hell it'll start to look like they won the thing. To me that invasion was so obviously the wrong move - not, as I said, invasion in general, just that one in particular - makes one wonder how they managed to get it wrong. My guess: the coalitions Israeli politics so often subject - beholden to mucks up decision making process.

With his 'Great Society Redux' budget has Obama demonstrated himself to be the uber liberal I originally feared he was? Get that feeling. Question I'm asking: have they made judgment that they can blame economic woes on rich people and Wall Street and therefore have a populist mechanism for ushering in a liberal agenda like we ain't seen since LBJ was moving his bowels in front of a captive audience? Get that feeling.

addendum: on Kudlow Report young Obama supporter basically confirms this thesis saying essentially who cares if Wall Street is unhappy, Obama's popularity at 65% - someone should tell him that Jimmy Carter's approval rating was at aprox 70% after a month in office - something to look forward to I guess, good golly.

addendumaloosa: just have to say, listening to budget geek at Obama press conference defending tax increases by saying, at pains to say, increases don't kick in for a year therefore ostensibly not during down turn, which I guess would be bad - to which I say: you're admitting tax increases would have a depressing effect - how therefore do you justify applying them then a year from now when, only if all goes well, we will be struggling to rise out of this mess? Makes no sense. You see what I'm saying? You admit tax increases are counter productive under certain conditions and then congratulate yourself for raising taxes under conditions only slightly removed - assuming all goes well - from those certain conditions - makes no fucking sense!

addendadumdum: report in Politico today suggests Pelosi and Obama in conflict because she doesn't think he's pushing a liberal enough agenda. That's a scary thought.

Starting to see evidence that the economic crisis is turning into a idealogical battlefield - and Wall Street's summary rejection of Obamanomics in the form of sharply decreasing values would appear to be a possible manifestation of this conflict. Brooks writes about it in column today, and it's something that I've noticed as well as I watch and listen to the pundits and political operatives vent spleen on rivals: right and left are wondering, are in the throes of an existential conundrum concerning who will be validated and who laid low by events current and yet to come.

I like to think I don't have a particular dog in that fight - but find myself speculating that possibly liberals, sensing an opportunity, are enjoying current dire conditions insomuch as: imagining themselves enlightened folks, it allows them to blame crisis on greed and other crudities while insinuating their high-minded ways would not have fallen so - this may be wrong but is not wholly unreasonable; being ashamed of America and its power and not being fans of power and powerful urges to begin with they possibly enjoy seeing America knocked down a notch or two and, moreover, see in a weakened America the long awaited for chance to remake it in an image more in line with their tastes - remade into a France or something. Certainly, for those who envision Obama as a vanguard for a new world order, fundamental to the establishing of such would be a chastened America. In that sense one hardly need be a communist or even a milquetoast socialist to take pleasure in the fall of Wall Street - just need to be a liberal all giddy with hope.

"... my impression of the state of the economy and the Obama administration's attempts to rescue it... I say impression because as a novitiate in these matters I can't really know, per se... I only have a sense of things... much like a person watching a play from a great distance through a telescope, you can make out the actions and interactions, watch lips move, eyes narrow and brows furrow, but for all that only hazard a guess as to what the damn thing's about... and I would guess this: that at least seventy-five percent of the stimulus plan is a waste of money doomed in the long run to do more harm than good and that will be paid for in part by taking money away from the military, with the effects of which no doubt fated to come back and haunt; that it's foolish to keep the housing market artificially inflated by trying to save the mortgages of people who can't really afford them - I don't see how trying to slow the release of noxious gas from the housing bubble makes any sense... I mean I see how declining values can have a cancerous effect on other values and increase toxicity of assets already toxic enough... still, I don't see how government can ad hoc fix housing prices that will be viewed as legitimate by the market or legitimately arbitrate whose mortgage is worth saving and whose isn't... you're telling me the government is going to tell some poor black family they have to move back to the projects because in objective terms they can't really afford the house they we're duped into buying?... no fucking way... although, if the government ends up taking over the banks in whole or part they'll end up owning the CDOs which means they'll end up owning the mortages anyway which means... I don't know what the fuck it means... ; that, despite the importance of trying to stem the rising unemployment tide, GM and Chrysler should be allowed to fail, declare bankruptcy and begin again within the context of much more viable business models - throwing money at them is akin to tossing good meat to a sick bear chained in your backyard so one day it can get just healthy enough to wriggle free and eat you; that when you get right down to essentials all that really matters is bringing the banking system back to life and that the only way to do that is to kill the bad banks off or kill off the bad assets weighing them down... no idea how you do that but the slow creep of an inevitable nationalization, which seems to be the case now, is decidedly not the answer... if certain banks have to fall let them fall - otherwise spell out the methodology for getting toxic assets off the books... Bernake states that Geitner's plan will work but they've been so laggard in releasing details about how it will work one begins to wonder if maybe they don't know!... anyway, anyway... whatever happens it will be painful, no doubt very painful... but one gets the feeling that too much of what Obama and the democrats are proposing sounds like the spin of people who have ulterior motives trying to convince us that it doesn't have to be so depressingly painful after all... but I think it does and misguided attempts to avoid that reality will just make things worse... true, Obama is on the one hand talking about hardship and travails etc etc - but then with the other hand he's throwing out inchoate trillion dollar promises of salvation, creating an environment of dread and uncertainty and suspicion that has pissed off Wall Street and done little to raise prospects on Main... or so goes the impression I'm getting..."

Interesting - somewhat, anyways - report in Politico concerning lack of CEO types in Obama White House - this dovetails nicely with story that in drafting their stimulus and bank rescue and mortgage relief plans they seemed to make it a matter of policy not to include actual business people in the discussions - which dovetails nicely with fact that all three of those initiatives have been greeted by steep declines and growing protestations of opposition on Wall Street - which dovetails nicely with my oft stated warning that if Obama tries to govern like an intellectual, especially an intellectual with pronounced liberal biases, if he tries to replicate as president the intellectual environment he knew and no doubt savoured as an academic, then we could be in a world of shit here. Certainly there's a world of shit feel to things at the moment.

But does his decision to send a division size 'surge' of troops to Afghanistan counter this sense of a left wing intellectual miasma hanging over ye body politik? Dunno - seems to be some impression out there that this commitment ad hoc in nature - there were reports about exteme rethink going on viz Afghanistan but surge comes without any real declaration of such. Times does report this morning that UAV attacks in Pakistani tribal regions are up this month, which could signal either a more aggressive military posture against Islamists or conversely an attempt to force Pakistan into a more aggressive military posture viz same. Certainly, increased UAV hits are gonna put civilian gov't in Islamabad, which so far has shown itself to be quite spineless, in a delicate position and will most definitely rile up the baddies - so to do such without having some kind of strategy in mind would be a tad dangerous.

Still, I do worry that it's simply a case of Obama realising that having committed to a more aggressive Afghan policy during the election he cannot now back down from it without signaling a potentially ruinous weakness to the evil doers. [and now word comes out that The Big O plans on mitigating burgeoning budget deficits by, among other things, cutting back in military expenditures, re Iraq and Afghanistan - so more confusion the way I read it]

re wistful attempts to defend the stimulus plan:

"... Pascal's wager would not be much help if by choosing to believe in God you increased the likelihood that Satan might be especially motivated to hunt you down and devour your soul - in that spirit Clark does not address argument that over the long haul the stimulus can do more harm than good, his assumptions are all akin to saying not much to lose should stimulus prove ineffective so why not give it a try, a logic that like Pascal's makes the mistake of assuming Satan to be a neutral player..."

"... well, you see, not to be glib of course, but I was reading a story about Somalia, about what a god awful place it is, possibly beyond hope, and how dangerous that hopelessness could potentially be, engendering as it does a most virulent strain of extremism... and I was just thinking, ya know, from a cost/benefit point of view... wondering, would it really be all that wrong just to drop a nuke on the place?... I mean once you sort of have time to get used to the wholesale carnage involved... would it really be that wrong a thing to do? And then of course I started thinking... ya know, wondering about applying a similar cost/benefit analysis to various scenarios... I started thinking 'Hell, there's probably a few places in the world that if ya gave 'em a good nuking it'd be hard to argue against the benefits that could accrue'... once you got past the carnage of course..."

... opinions on Obama apparently delaying action on Afghan troop 'surge' decision despite fact that several high placed officers intimated decision was close at hand? Spin is Obama thoroughly going over issues, ruthlessly deliberating over advice and policy input from the military - ie, doing exact opposite of how Dubbya was perceived to have made such decisions. Mere show? Classic liberal distrust of military establishment? The deadlock of over debating a problem out of fear of making a mistake on such a weighty issue? Doesn't even have to be fear, just realisation that foreign policy debates are not as easily adjudicated as domestic policy debates by simple application of ideological dogma? Or actually a case of responsible due diligence?

Dunno - certainly Gates has been advocating a thorough rethink of the whole Afghan policy so could simply be a reflection of that. Very hard to say - two points though: one, Obama talked up Afghan surge during campaign and therefore to step back now would represent his first serious foreign policy stumble insomuch as potentially undermines military credibility; two, I said at the time his talking up Afghanistan was a load of crap - since he'd built his campaign around opposing the Iraq war the only way he could project military gravitas was to talk tough on Afghanistan but now finds himself at the point where actions have dire consequences and rhetorical flourishes only serve to confuse and obscure that reality.

Again, hard to say what's what here - but am struck by how press only seems to see the ostensible positives of this endless rumination when the potential negatives are so clearly there.

Ok, had enough of this - heard again from liberal, or maybe even wasn't a liberal, whatever - some so called expert going on about how Obama's approach to foreign policy will be an improvement over Bush's because he recognizes that America can't do it alone and therefore is willing to accommodate other view points etc etc etc and how this will make foreign partners more willing to participate - subtext: they'll like us more now because we're becoming more like them. This is idiocy: countries cooperate out of self interest and therefore it is incumbent upon America to make the parameters of that self interest evident as regards itself because what other countries see as important may work to the disadvantage of America - in short, like has nothing to do with it. That your partners have to be happy in some to be determined context is obviously true, but America must substantially dictate that context if it wants to lead and as the most powerful member it has no choice but to lead.

I'm not gonna sit here and judge Obama's presidency after one bloody month [although concerns are rising] but this constant wrapping of the man and his supposed 'approach' to things in this new age gauze is quite frankly disturbing - and full of dangers, the way I see it.