Just the opposite: The deepest and darkest moment of the contraction has passed, and the question before the economy now is how rapidly it can return to health. A dozen years ago, the economy was plunging so rapidly nobody could even measure the speed of the collapse, let alone discern a bottom. Americans in had been conditioned to treat budget deficits as their greatest threat. This began when Ronald Reagan created the modern era of large deficits, which thrust Democrats into the role of fiscal stewards.
In part this reflected economic conditions that were once very real. Inflation in the s, while lower than the previous decade, remained high, and periodically threatened to spiral when the deficit peaked. Alan Greenspan informed incoming president Bill Clinton that his economy depended on persuading the bond market he had a serious plan to reduce the deficit, and he was not necessarily wrong — interest rates did seem to threaten to choke off the economy.
The focus on deficits spread beyond Washington and Wall Street, becoming a national obsession. Ross Perot created a national populist movement by making deficits a symbol of national decline. The fantasy of who could cut through partisan rancor and solve this singular crisis was often reflected in popular culture. And so when Obama took office, the news media treated the deficit, not the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression, as the primary crisis. Republicans embraced the idea that deficit spending could only worsen the economic crisis.
The ends deficit reduction and the means bipartisan cooperation were linked together so tightly that journalists considered it almost axiomatic that if he could cooperate with Republicans, the deal would be over deficits. In the intervening years, the assumptions that produced this atmosphere have all collapsed one by one.
The rise of Donald Trump is the largest single cause of the transformation. It was obvious to some of us all along that Republican claims to have a passionate concern for fiscal probity were insincere. Trump has made it impossible to ignore.
The beliefs that sincerely animated reporters and officials in Washington during the Obama era — that the Tea Party was a reaction to debt levels, that Republican leaders were willing or able to deal with Obama — were turned into a running joke by a Republican president who won the nomination in part because he never fooled himself into believing any of these things.
Democrats in Congress also learned an important lesson from the Obama era. Many moderate Democrats shared a belief with the mainstream media that bipartisanship was both possible and necessary. Democrats in Congress squandered much of their time pursuing fruitless negotiations with Republicans, chasing a deal they were sure lay just around the corner.
He had intended to engage publicly only after the convention now scheduled for August, at the earliest , in line with his fall barnstorming campaign on behalf of Clinton in and congressional candidates in Nonetheless, he was becoming more agitated by the state of the race as Sanders surged, and Biden slumped.
Democratic officials say Obama had no direct role in the campaign shake-up that happened soon after. But he did tell Pete Buttigieg, a moderate, that he would never have more leverage than on the day that he was quitting the race — and the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor soon joined the avalanche of former candidates backing Biden.
Sanders, who in accused the Democratic establishment of conspiring to support Clinton, took note of all these moves, but he has made no such charges against Obama. And Sanders, who has denied reports that he contemplated a primary challenge to Obama in , had made a point of reaching out to the former president several times in recent months to update him on the progress of his campaign.
Before those conversations, the two men had a polite but frosty relationship, and some of their private exchanges over the years devolved into policy debates, former aides said. Sanders is much closer personally to Biden despite their political differences, but Obama, unlike Biden, remains a trusted figure to many Sanders supporters, so much so that his campaign released an ad that featured a patchwork of clips with Obama lavishing praise on Sanders.
In late March, Obama reached out to Sanders. The two men would talk at least three more times, with the former president reassuring Sanders that he had already accomplished much of what he had set out to do, moving the party — and Biden — substantially to the left, according to two people with knowledge of their interactions.
But, the people said, he mostly listened to Sanders, who was in a reflective mood, speaking candidly about his post-campaign plans and feelings about the race, the kind of conversation the two men had never had before. I was proud to fight alongside President BarackObama for middle-class families. I know how to fight—and I know how to win. The ad has received blowback from former Obama staffers, though, and the relationship between Bloomberg and Obama is complicated.
In South Carolina, a Joe Biden campaign ad features clips of Obama, as a narrator describes the president ushering in Obamacare into law and then switches to saying Biden will never let Obamacare be repealed. There too, the intention is clear: tie the candidate to Obama.
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