Why, of course it is, Paul Krugman’s histrionics notwithstanding. But to the extent that President Obama has had problems governing it, he need only look into the mirror to find a culprit for his Administration’s political failings, as Jay Cost points out.

We start, of course, with an obvious point, yet one that appears to have escaped some people:

The President’s two major initiatives – cap-and-trade and health care – have failed because there was not a broad consensus to enact them. Our system is heavily biased against such proposals. That’s a good thing.

It’s not accurate to blame this on the Republicans. From Arlen Specter’s defection to Scott Brown’s swearing in, Democrats had total control over the policy-making process. The only recourse the Republicans had was the First Amendment. They used it well, but don’t let it be said that the President lacked access to it. Given Mr. Obama’s bully pulpit and his omnipresence on the national stage, his voice has been louder than anybody’s. If Mr. Obama has lost the public debate to the beleaguered rump that is the congressional GOP, he has nobody to blame but himself.

The funny thing, of course, is that immediately upon attainment of the 60-vote majority, we started hearing from various Democratic politicians, and pundits, that 60 votes was just not enough, that there would be slippage, that the Democrats might still fail to get things done, that they really needed 67 or 68 votes, etc. The arguments were ludicrous then, and they are ludicrous now; no President, or Congressional majority leadership class would be anything but overjoyed to have 60 votes of their own party in the Senate. The only downside to having 60 votes on one’s side is that one no longer has excuses for failure. And that means that if the Obama Administration could not produce with 60 votes, then it is the Obama Administration–and the President, specifically–who ought to take the blame.

The President has now taken to telling his fellow Democrats that 59 votes, while not filibuster-proof, is still pretty darned good. In fact, he said as much in the State of the Union Address, stating “I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.” He’s quite right, which means that if Democrats do end up “run[ning] for the hills,” the President ought to bear the responsibility for that, as should members of the Congressional leadership.

Cost also debunks a separate effort to scapegoat a certain group for the Administration’s political problems:

It’s not accurate to blame this on “spineless Democrats,” i.e. rank-and-file legislators who balked at the various solutions offered by Mr. Obama. Moderate Democrats might have defected because they were worried about their jobs – but the point of popular elections is to link the personal interests of legislators with the interests of their constituents. It often fails to work – but in a situation where “spineless Democrats” clearly voted with their districts, it seems to have been working pretty well. One might argue that they should have shown some leadership – voted for unpopular bills because they were good for the country. But ask those thirty to forty House Democratic defectors on the health care, cap-and-trade, and jobs bills whether they thought the bills were good for the country, and you’ll hear a different answer than the one Newsweek is quick to give.

And finally, Cost points out that it is not right to blame the American people for this state of affairs, though of course, it would be funny if the Democrats tried to do so in an election year.

Barack Obama’s problem is that he has allowed the Congressional leadership to run things in his name on the Hill. As Cost states, this gives Nancy Pelosi a lot of power, and since Pelosi is more left than center, it should come as no surprise that much of the legislation coming out of Congress is more left than center, thus alienating Congress and the Administration from the American people. This failing is the key one.

Cost also argues that the President was wrong to seek “comprehensive reform,” but here, I part company with him; the President’s decision to seek “comprehensive reform” in his first year is in keeping with the fact that the President is rarely as powerful and influential in domestic affairs as he is in his first year. I don’t blame Barack Obama for thinking that he could have achieved “comprehensive reform” in his first year, given the fact that he started his first year with a great deal of political capital. His problem is that he did not spend that capital wisely by taking ownership of the reforms he sought to push. Rather, he abdicated responsibilities to Congress, and got back bills that were not to the liking of the American public as a consequence.

On the issue of partisan obstruction, of course, I am back on the Cost bandwagon; one cannot really make a case that the Republicans have just decided to sabotage the Obama Administration when the President loses GOP moderates like Mike Castle and Olympia Snowe. These people have a lot more latitude to depart from the GOP party line, given that they need to appeal to independents more than does the typical GOP Representative or Senator, in order to ensure that they get re-elected. And yet, they had problems with the legislation that the Obama Administration was cheering for, and trying to get enacted into law. It may be easy to say that the evil Republicans are the ones bringing the Obama Administration to grief, but at some point, the President must admit to himself that all has not gone well with his own political operations.

The problem, of course, is that while “GOP obstructionism!” can be reduced to a pithy five-second argument–which is just perfect fodder for the media–arguments like Cost’s, valid though they are, require time and energy to explain. I wish it were otherwise; like the President, the media needs to face up to the fact that while America is plenty governable, the President has not done well in governing it.

Democrats trying to defend their flailing healthcare bills have tried, repeatedly, a two-pronged attack on the mostly united Republican opposition to the various plans floated by the Senate and House Democrats and the Obama White House. One is to suggest that Republicans are criticizing the proposed Democratic solutions without having any of their own – implying that there really is no other choice but to pass a Democratic bill and that Republican opposition is irresponsible. The other and related contention is to argue that Republicans have a responsibility to cooperate in bipartisan fashion on the bills currently under consideration, rather than seek those bills’ defeat.

These arguments are useful as political spin, but they are wrong. Moreover, they ignore the fact that the GOP has opposed the healthcare bills with much the same strategy employed by the Democrats against George W. Bush’s effort to reform Social Security – which almost certainly resulted in the destruction of any chance in the foreseeable future to fix Social Security’s fiscal problems or even prevent them from getting worse – as well as by forces both Right and Left against the Bush-McCain-Kennedy comprehensive immigration bill.

For the uninitiated, here’s a sampling of what conservatives and Republicans do think about health care. I can’t speak for everybody, but I think I can explain in general what the majority of the Right thinks and wants on this isue, and why it precludes most if not all elected Republicans from supporting any comprehensive healthcare bill built along the lines of those floated over the past year:

1. The System Is Not That Bad: The fundamental disconnect starts at the beginning: by and large, most people on the Right think the United States has a great healthcare system, the best in the world. Pretty much nobody thinks the system is perfect: there are lots of skewed financial incentives, lawsuits are too expensive and prevalent, costs are excessive in some parts of the system, and there are, in fact, too many people who don’t get care they need. The system is messy in much the same way that democracy and free markets are messy, and similarly in need of constant tweaking. But the general feeling among conservatives and Republicans is that while you might make fundamental changes in the structure of the system if you were starting it from scratch, when you’re dealing with the system as it is, the best thing to do is work around the margins rather than launch a massive federal takeover of the whole shebang that rewrites every aspect of the system from Washington with no possible way to anticipate how all those changes will play out.

That very premise is the basis of the deep divisions over this issue, and helps explain why the further the process has advanced, the more public opinion has favored the opposition, despite the generalized initial public sentiment that “reforms” should be implemented. If the voters are leery of drastic, comprehensive systemic “reform” now that they have had time to see what it looks like, they will naturally prefer doing nothing at all. Maybe the opportunity won’t come this way again soon to do a fundamental overhaul of the system, but there’s always a next year to do smaller, more incremental bills that work around the margins. That’s precisely why the GOP has suffered no political damage for not having its own comprehensive plan – GOP solutions like permitting insurance to be sold across state lines are piecemeal and can be enacted as such without having to get all the moving parts into the same bill.

This is the diametric opposite of President Obama’s position. As the President put it in last week’s State of the Union Address:

There’s a reason why many doctors, nurses, and health care experts who know our system best consider this approach a vast improvement over the status quo. But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. (Applause.) Let me know. Let me know. (Applause.) I’m eager to see it.

There you have it – he’s only willing to consider an alternative proposal if, in his view, it reduces premiums and reduces the deficit and covers all the uninsured and “strengthens” Medicare, and clamps down on “abuses” by insurance companies – even a proposal guaranteed to do any one of those things is unacceptable.
That’s a recipe for giving Republicans no choice but to simply say “no.” But it doesn’t mean the GOP, if it took control of Congress, would be unwilling or unable to present the Obama White House with bills that could address particular problems with the system.
2. What Matters Is Health Care, Not Health Insurance: The core concept behind comprehensive reform is that the federal government has a responsibility to eliminate with one fell swoop the estimate tens of millions of people (nobody knows the real number) who lack insurance. This is one reason why the Democratic plans all include a mandate that compels citizens to purchase insurance, and why they also include a battery of other interlocking provisions designed to control the allocation of risks, the imposition of costs, and the terms on which insurance can be offered or coverage denied. Despite all of that, it remains questionable whether the uninsured would truly be eliminated under any bill on the table – to pick two examples, illegal aliens may be hesitant to claim coverage (and could be barred from coverage, depdning how one reads the bills), and if the less onerous penalties for refusing to buy insurance are selected (the Senate bill won’t criminalize refusing to participate in the mandate; the House would), some young, healthy people will just pay the fine and opt out of the system.
Is it worth disrupting the health insurance arrangements of the insured majority to extend coverage to the uninsured minority, and perhaps not even all of the uninsured minority? To answer that, you need to remember that what matters isn’t insurance, it’s care – the sole purpose of health insurance is to secure access to health care.

And people without insurance in this country still get health care, often from sources like clinics and emergency rooms. Not all the care they may want or in some cases need, nor the best or most cost-effective care. And of course, not everyone with insurance receives perfect care either. Many of the distinctions between the insured and the uninsured are differences of degree. Moreover, many of those who lack private sector insurance are covered under Medicaid or Medicare.

Conservatives don’t argue that this is an optimal situation – but we do argue that in light of these realities, it’s entirely acceptable to focus on solutions that improve access to both insurance and care, rather than guaranteeing insurance. If you can reduce genuinely unnecessary barriers to competition and low-cost insurance, if you can provide better ways for people to shield assets from taxation to spend on healthcare – these are goals that can reduce the number of people who lack insurance, without necessarily having to come up with a single magic bullet that claims to eliminate the lack of insurance overnight.

3. Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom: A fundamental objection to Obamacare in its various forms is that by enacting a vast new federal regulatory and entitlement structure, it freezes the entire industry in amber in ways that will choke off the possibility for future revisions. The political trauma of the efforts to enact this legialstion only underscores the extent to which politicians will be unwilling to revisit comprehensive changes in the future. If it passes and doesn’t work out perfectly – and how many government programs do? – neither the states, nor the private sector, nor in all likelihood future Congresses will be able to fix it. Like Medicare, it will simply run on autopilot forever more.

This was one of the objections Scott Brown raised in the Massachusetts Senate race: Massachusetts has its own statewide system of “Romneycare,” which had many similarities to the federal program. But the Massachusetts Legislature today remains free to alter or repeal or defund Romneycare, much the way that Tennessee’s Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen has done with TennCare, the system originally modeled after Hillary Clinton’s health care plan, when it grew too expensive for his state.

The states are, in Brandeis’ term, the laboratories of democracy for at least two reasons. One, multiple states can try differing approaches, and learn from each others’ experiences – whereas once the federal government acts, innovation is at an end. Two, states do not have the federal government’s budgetary processes – many have balanced budget amendments or other constraints on deficit spending, they have to compete with rival states to keep taxes reasonable, some have line-item vetos, zero-based budgeting or other tools Washington lacks for revisiting budgetary decisions annually, and the partisan/ideological temperature is lower in many statehouses. When forced to make genuine choices among competing budgetary priorities, states can’t just choose “all of the above.”

The diversity of state and private-sector approaches is also evident in the debate over rationing of care and whether this will lead to government “death panels.” It is true that rationing in one sense or another – that is, decisions to forego some care on cost/benefit grounds – will occur in any remotely fiscally responsible healthcare system. It is arguable, even, that not enough rationing is done today. Ideally, rationing should be done by the consumer, as happens in any field where consumers, rather than insurance intermediaries, make purchasing decisions; as Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, the GOP’s go-to guy on health care these days, explains:

Rationing happens today! The question is who will do it? The government? Or you, your doctor and your family?
… what I’m saying is that rather than having government ration care to manage decline, let’s take those market signals that work in every sector of the economy to reduce cost and improve competition. I got Lasik in 2000. That’s a cash surgery. It cost me $2,000 an eye. Since then, it’s been revolutionized three times and now costs $800 an eye. This sector isn’t immune from free-market principles.

What’s particularly menacing about putting rationing power in the monpolistic hands of the vast, impersonal and bureaucratic federal government is, again, that it eliminates the possibility of competition or outside supervision putting any counterweight on the desire to control costs. It’s possible, of course, that the federal government will respond to concerns about rationing by being profligate, but that presents the opposite problem of hemhorraging money. Either way, the system becomes much less fluid when a single actor with the coercive power of the state behind it is calling the shots.

Even where the GOP has more ambitious proposals for reform, they are not based on top-down diktats from Washington; Ryan argues for a broader, less incremental approach than many in the party, but his proposals would operate by gradual, voluntary reform of existing structures through the market, rather than an avalanche of new regulation driven from a single office in the capital:

We set up state-based exchanges. You don’t have to participate in the exchange if you don’t want to. You don’t have to sell it in the exchange if you don’t want to. I don’t want a closed system that will gravitate towards more government control. I want it to be decentralized that has regulatory competition and market competition. You can be in or out of the exchange, which keeps everybody honest.

Note the emphasis on avoiding individual or employer mandates, thus avoiding the most freedom-encroaching aspects of Obamacare while also eliding the major Constitutional objections to compelling people to buy a private company’s products, as well as the essentially corrupt nature of tethering individuals to a government-compelled relationship with large insurers.

4. This Is Still America: The final really core disagreement is that many Republicans and nearly all conservatives object on principle to making health care a fundamental entitlement guaranteed by the national government. Experience the world over shows that health care is one of the most critical tipping points in altering the relationship between the citizen and the government in cradle-to-grave social-welfare states on the European model (when people call Obama a “socialist,” this – along with de facto direct government control of major industries – is what they are thinking of). Having health care systems run at the state level is bad enough, but having them uniformly dependent upon Washington for funding and regulatory favor simply takes too many of the most important things in life and puts them in a single pair of hands. That’s not the American Way, and if that sets us apart from other nations, it should.

When all is said and done, when 2010 has – as it seems increasingly likely – come and gone without the passage of a sweeping comprehensive federalization of health care, Republicans in due course will offer, and will need to offer, constructive solutions of their own that can marshal support across the GOP and, hopefully, in some cases across party lines. But what will be clear is that those solutions will not be just mirror images of the Democrats’ vision. They will instead reflect these core distinctions: incrementalism over one-bill-to-rule-them-all; a focus on increasing access and decreasing cost rather than making sweeping guarantees; avoidance of coercive government mandates; and diffusion of power among consumers, states and businesses rather than concentration in Washington.

After Obamacare, we can stop pretending that a handful of experts in Washington know better than the rest of the country. After Obamacare, we can return to debating solutions more in line with traditional American values and American ways of solving problems by the trials and errors of a free people. After Obamacare, the goals will be more modest, but more realistic. After Obamacare, health care reform will still be possible – but only if President Obama abandons his utopian schemes and looks at the kind of solutions that Americans have long regarded as common ground.

Dan McLaughlin is an attorney in New York.

“We have never had, in the history of the world, periods of sustained economic prosperity and growth accompanied by a sustained decline in population. Today, every developed nation in the world is witnessing this decline.”

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Sanger: Obama’s Permanent Deficits
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If your house is worth 75% or less than what you owe on your mortgage, should you mail the keys to the bank and just walk away?

This question, with its sharp moral edge, has been debated since the beginning of the housing crisis. And today there is some new information, in the form of a survey by First American CoreLogic.

According to CoreLogic, nearly one in ten mortgages is on a property that’s worth less than 75% of the outstanding mortgage principal. That shockingly high proportion will rise if the housing market continues to correct downward, as I believe it should in many parts of the country. The survey also puts a number on what it would take to simply gross up all of those deeply underwater mortgages: $745 billion, about 6% of the total value of American residential mortgages now in force, and about 5% of GDP.

The housing market, like all others, has its cyclical highs and lows. And high unemployment means that many homeowners are having serious trouble paying their mortgages. But this downturn has a unique feature: millions of employed people are staying current on mortgages that they can afford, even though the value of the underlying house has fallen well below what they owe.

In strictly practical terms, this is an irrational thing to do. There’s evidence that perhaps half a million people so far have gone directly into default from being current on their mortgages, without missing any payments. These presumably are the people who are just “walking away” as a matter of economic logic.

Of course they’ll take a hit to their credit ratings. But as long as they’re not job hunting (where poor credit will keep them from being hired), their living standards can take a big step up as they trade their monthly mortgage payment for a rental payment on a much nicer space.

So what’s stopping more people from doing this? The moral dimension. Most people believe that a deal is a deal. If you sign on the dotted line, you have to keep the payments up as long as you are able. And further, you should manage your affairs such that you can continue to be able, perhaps forgoing other purchases or staying in a job you dislike.

It’s very unattractive to argue against such a correct and admirable commitment to personal obligations. But in the case of deeply underwater mortgages, the commitment erodes the financial position of individuals, who in effect are paying for something they’re not getting. This weakens the macro economy over time, as people permanently lose a chunk of their purchasing power.

It also keeps the housing market from correcting to lower levels more in line with economic reality. This continued overvaluation diverts capital away from more productive uses.

I can deal with the moral dimension of the argument by pointing out that there is a lender for every borrower. People who bought at the top of the market, or who cashed out house equity multiple times as bubble values rose, borrowed from bankers who simultaneously bet that the good times would continue. Both parties to the contract are responsible for having made a bad decision, and should have exposure to the downside.

After all, a banker or a business borrower would barely hesitate to walk away from an obligation that no longer made economic sense.

So where do we go from here? There are several pathways, but as it turns out, they all lead roughly to the same place.

What happens if five million Americans decide to stop overpaying their mortgages and mail the keys back to the bank? There would be a sharp decline in housing values. There would be another downward leg to the financial crisis, with a big hit to the capital of banks and other institutions holding large mortgage portfolios.

I think the housing decline would be a healthy thing, as this market is still overvalued. I don’t believe we would see a deflationary spiral, a widespread collapse of debt values, and a descent into a full-fledged Great Depression II. This was the great fear when the bubble first started popping in late 2006.

But since late 2008, the Bernanke Doctrine has showed that the modern Fed has the tools to keep this from happening. Administration officials can say whatever they want, but Too-Big-To-Fail is still reality.

What of the decline in individual purchasing power, the so-called adverse wealth effect, that would come with lower housing values? It would be muted because making mortgage payments on an overvalued house diminishes purchasing power just as badly.

But the net effect of the Great Walkaway would still be a strong downdraft in the overall economy.

What if we just use taxpayer money to give a mulligan to everyone with an underwater mortgage? In other words, the Treasury would write a big check to your bank, to prepay enough of your mortgage to bring the principal amount back down to reality and give you a much lower monthly payment.

Thanks to CoreLogic, we now have a rough guess what this would cost: about $745 billion. We would in effect be borrowing this money (adding to the federal deficit), and applying it as capital to the balance sheets of the lending institutions that currently hold underwater mortgages.

Of course, those lenders would take a large hit to earnings. They’re now in the enviable position of receiving payment streams that are far above current market values, because homeowners think it’s morally wrong not to overpay for housing. Lenders would need to put the new capital out at much lower rates of interest, most likely by buying longer-dated Treasury debt.

Alternatively, they could negotiate to receive more than a dollar from taxpayers for each dollar they apply to mortgage prepayments, to compensate them for the hit to earnings. (Just don’t let word of that get out. Taxpayers would have an apoplectic fit.)

This would probably also trigger a relatively orderly decline in housing values, as people who are no longer underwater suddenly become able to refinance and move into less-expensive houses. The net effect would be similar to the Great Walkaway, perhaps somewhat less disruptive: a sharp decline in economic activity, followed by a fast readjustment to more sustainable growth conditions.

The problem with the Big Mulligan idea is, again, moral. What justifies giving such a large gift to several million people who, it must be said, made bad or even exploitive financial decisions? How can we justify to taxpayers at large that they must pay for the mistakes of others? And how do we justify allowing lenders to walk away from some mythologically bad business decisions without losing so much as a penny?

And at a time of bitter public anger over high deficits, how can we justify adding another 5% of GDP to the public debt? This idea is probably a non-starter.

What if we do nothing? Then we’ll continue the current overvaluation of the housing market, and the erosion of personal finances for years to come. The net effect of this will be a reduction in overall economic dynamism and growth, as capital continues to be misallocated to the overvalued market.

As you see, the Great Walkaway, the Big Mulligan, and the Do Nothing ideas all lead more or less to the same place. As a society, we have sustained a huge decline in asset values as the housing bubble popped. And we’re going to spread out the impact of the decline and suffer it in a socialized way. Several more years of economic weakness are ahead, no matter what happens here.

The most likely outcome is halfway between the Great Walkaway, and Do Nothing. Many more people, perhaps millions more, will mail the keys back to the bank. What can be done for them?

I expect that Congress will come under pressure to declare a “credit-rating amnesty” for people who default on deeply underwater mortgages. The rating agencies will either be required to suppress such defaults after a much shorter amount of time. Or users of credit records will be required to discount or underweight them when making credit and employment decisions.

The research that led parents to doubt whether to vaccinate their children has today, finally, been retracted. In 1998, Dr Andrew Wakefield and others published a speculative study in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, associating behavioral and intestinal problems in eight children with the measles mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

But no other researchers have replicated his results, and finally The Lancet’s editors have retracted the paper, something they should have done back in 2004 (or preferably they should have never published the paper). Numerous flaws—including a small sample, no control group, and unresolved reverse causality (the vaccine is given around the same age that autism is generally diagnosed)—led 10 of the study’s 12 authors to recant in 2004, saying “no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.” But still Dr Wakefield kept campaigning.

It’s been a bad week for Dr Wakefield, since he was censured by Britain’s General Medical Council for a whole slew of charges relating to ethical infractions, and generally poor behavior for a researcher using human subjects, in this case children.

More important and more dangerous than Dr Wakefield’s strife is that he convinced many parents to stop vaccinating their children: the result is at least a ten-fold increase in measles in UK alone. And today, steadily weakening vaccination coverage in Britain and four other countries is undermining efforts to eradicate measles across Europe and increasing the threat to the United States.

As I noted last year:

In the United States, the vast majority of the measles reported “were imported from or associated with importations from other countries, particularly countries in Europe, where several outbreaks are ongoing,” says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. “Measles is one of the first diseases to reappear when vaccination coverage rates fall,” CDC also noted.

EUVac, a European network for tracking vaccine-preventable diseases, found Europeans have also taken measles to South America, which was previously free of the disease. EUVac blamed Britain, Germany, Romania, Switzerland, and Italy. Europeans have taken measles to South America, which was previously free of the disease.

The MMR vaccine has cut death from measles worldwide from roughly 750,000 in 2000 to 197,000 in 2007, according to the World Health Organization. Two-thirds of the reduction was in Africa, where deaths dropped by 89 percent. In rich countries, measles is often viewed as a nuisance—indeed, there were only seven deaths in Europe out of 12,132 cases in 2006 and 2007, according to EUVac. However, such a statistic hides the long-term consequences of the disease and the suffering it creates. Even if measles does not kill you, it can cause pneumonia and miscarriage. Rubella can cause miscarriage or stillbirth and can leave surviving children with heart defects, deaf-blindness, and other organ damage. Before the introduction of the MMR vaccine in 1969, mumps was the most common cause of viral meningitis. Mumps can also cause encephalitis in children and young adults and can sterilize men.

Despite the importance of vaccination to healthy children and adults, the commitment to vaccination in the West is weakening, due to the MMR controversy. Nearly a quarter of children in Britain are not getting the two doses required for total immunity.

Dr Wakefield must take most of the blame for this fiasco, but The Lancet editors deserve some too. At issue is how a journal treats new and explosive findings. Studying potentially dangerous practices, from smoking to occupational hazards, such as carcinogens in factories, required epidemiology to establish the link – in much the same way Dr Wakefield tried for the MMR. But he didn’t follow most of the guidelines (written by Sir Austin Bradford Hills) for finding a likely causal relationship between two factors – his sample was tiny, he could not explain a plausible biological link, and his subjects were self-selected with no controls, all major factors, which should have led the Lancet editors to reject the paper and ask for further evidence before publication.

We need academic risk takers prepared to take a chance of going against establishment thinking, but they should play by the scientific rules, because the result when they don’t can be fatal.

Roger Bate is the Legatum Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes from London.

Rep. Chris van Hollen (D-Md) just scored House Republicans this weekend for attending lots of groundbreaking and ribbon-cutting ceremonies in their districts after having voted against the $787 billion stimulus package last year. His point is part of a big story that Democrats are deeply dependent on selling effectively: that fiscal stimulus is the reason why we’re not experiencing a second Great Depression.

It isn’t. The financial system was saved from a deflationary spiral (which indeed would have resembled another Depression) primarily by the bold and creative responses by Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and others, in the depths of the acute crisis of late 2008. Most of this work was done before the current president was inaugurated.

(Sidebar: to those Senators of both parties who looked past their legitimate objections and voted to confirm Bernanke, thank you. You did the right thing.)

But there are two crises: an economic one as well as a financial one. And the economic crisis, with stubborn high unemployment and reduced personal consumption expenditures, continues as strong as ever.

It’s certainly true that deficit spending as large as the current administration has done, and will propose to continue doing [link], provides a lift to GDP. All of those groundbreaking and ribbon-cutting ceremonies in various Congressional districts do indeed come with some kind of job creation.

But is it permanent job creation? There’s convincing evidence that fiscal stimulus gooses current-period GDP. The latest is in last week’s GDP report [link]. You saw a clear decline in consumer durables-spending relative to Q3, which correlates to the end of the Cash for Clunker automaker subsidy.

Yet there’s no sustained evidence, either now or in history, that fiscal stimulus does what the Keynesians claim. They think, intuitively enough, that government-generated demand kickstarts private demand and *causes* economies to recover.

It’s probably much closer to true that economies recover on their own, *coincident* with government stimulus efforts. Government efforts, which include “automatic stabilizers” like lower tax payments and higher unemployment benefits, perform a useful stopgap function, but don’t actually cause recoveries to start.

And here we are in a deep recession that differs from recent ones because it’s a balance sheet recession. The powerful downdraft in stock market and home-equity values has made it impossible for households to access as much credit as has been the norm for roughly the past two decades. Households therefore simply have no choice but to consume less. You can’t lose a large fraction of your life savings without changing your spending habits at least somewhat.

And guess what? Fiscal stimulus by the government does very little to repair this damage, except by the normal, unleveraged process of keeping a few extra people in their jobs. What many people are saying now is that we failed last year by not borrowing and spending nearly enough, and we have to do more now. Fine, but the results won’t be any different.

It would make a lot more sense for policymakers (Bernanke among them) to acknowledge that it’s not a good idea to fuel incremental private consumption with growth in credit. At some point, there is too much debt for householders to sustain.

It would also be an excellent thing if policymakers would acknowledge that the same applies to public credit. We’re using deficit-driven fiscal stimulus as a countercyclical tool against a balance-sheet recession. That means we’re replacing the borrowing and spending that consumers and businesses used to do, with borrowing and spending by the federal government.

Government borrowing and spending is deeply seductive because it’s so much cheaper. The US taxpayer is still by far the best credit in the world. But that just postpones the day of reckoning.

It’s going to take several years, maybe longer, for consumers to repair their balance sheets. Consumer spending, which is 70% of the US economy, will take that long to recover. *This is a structural effect, not amenable to improvement by the government.*

Instead, the Keynesians persist in thinking that fiscal stimulus will wake up the animal spirits. And as I said, their spending indeed does goose current-period GDP. But you have to keep stimulating year after year, because the jobs that the government creates aren’t permanent.

How long can we keep it up? Are we going to keep enacting trillion-plus dollar deficits for another decade, while we wait for the economy to get stimulated? Oh wait, yes we are. The current president has already said so.

But public deficit spending isn’t going to stimulate private credit formation and consumption-growth until consumers get their balance sheets healed. People who want you to think that a much bigger stimulus last year would have magically fixed the economy are deeply deluded. Or deeply mendacious.

And Congressional Republicans shouldn’t take this bait, either. Let’s recognize that deficit spending is primarily useful for enabling cities and states to avoid enforcing their own fiscal discipline (which is far more painful because they can’t borrow, as the federal government can). And let’s recognize that there is some point in doing that. (If nothing else, it pays off the public-employee unions that Democratic officials in office.)

Let’s avoid the trap of thinking that stimulus will bring the economy back all by itself.

This week, the Obama Administration finally announced the contents of a long-anticipated arms sale to Taiwan, including PAC-3 Patriot missiles that can intercept ballistic missiles that China might use to terrorize, or to destroy, Taiwanese cities.

This will be another fly under the paper over U.S.-Chinese tensions that were rising even before revelations that China used Google not only to suppress thoughtcrimes within China itself, but also to spy on Americans.   China’s targets included “major financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions,” human rights advocacy groups in Washington, and “Chinese human rights advocates in the United States, Europe and China.” Not even the U.S. Congress is off limits. In June 2008, U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf, a strong human rights advocate, accused China of hacking into his office’s computers. Google is now threatening to leave China, and the State Department issued an official protest. Contrary to predictions that U.S.-China tensions would dissolve as commercial links increased, mutual economic dependence has amplified tensions as China has evolves from Communism toward a new political model based on angry, nationalist Fascism. That model seems to be working. China’s younger generation may not love the way their government treats them, but many seem to approve of its arrogance and hostility toward foreign news media, human rights organizations, and of course, America. The ugly new mood was shocking enough to cause the New Yorker to apply the single most vulgar epithet in its lexicon: “neocon.” Things aren’t about to get better now.

Personally, I was disappointed that the Obama Administration didn’t show its displeasure over the Google flap by offering China’s sole elected and legitimate government a few Minuteman-II ICBM’s. Even so, it’s safe to assume that the ChiComs would be inciting their new, digitally synced Boxers had we sold the Taiwanese a few of these gizmos instead. The fact that the new arms package angered Beijing is probably a good sign, though — to be completely serious for one moment — the absence of F-16’s is a disappointment.

For your amusement, the BBC conveys what must be the single emptiest threat of the year, so far: a threat by China to withdraw its cooperation in disarming North Korea. In related news, Roman Polanski is threatening to stop cooperating with his extradition, John Edwards is threatening to suspend compliance with his marital vows, and Robert Downey is threatening to start smoking crack again … probably around eleven, unless he decides to sleep in. If you wish, you may insert your own reference to O.J.’s tireless search for the real killer here.

To understand the emptiness of China’s threat and understand how we might respond to it, let’s briefly review the record of China’s compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874, passed just last June, with UNSCR 1718, which followed North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test, and with its professed desire for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula in general. China voted for both U.N. resolutions.

- Exhibit A: A recent study by the eminent economists Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard shows that China undermined UNSCR 1718 by increasing aid and trade to offset declining trade with South Korea, which eventually grew weary of feeding the North Korean nuclear beast. Language in UNSCR 1718 required those remitting funds to North Korea to “ensure” that the funds would not be used for the development of prohibited weapons.

- Exhibit B: Chinese banks have long helped North Korea launder proceeds of its illegal activity, including the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, and probably also including its international arms sales. Most infamous among these was Banco Delta Asia, but several 2005 news reports also implicated the Bank of China.

- Exhibit C: After North Korea’s May 2009 nuke test, China and Russia joined forces to weaken the initial drafts of UNSCR 1874 proposed by the United States. China managed to shield North Korea from a total ban on (mostly Chinese) weapons purchases and the authority of member states to board North Korean ships on the high seas to search for banned cargo.

- Exhibit D: Months after the passage of UNSCR 1874, Chinese trade with North Korea — chiefly with companies controlled by the North Korean military — remained almost constant with 2008 levels, decreasing slightly only because oil prices had sagged in comparison to 2008’s record prices. This business-as-usual approach almost certainly disregarded provisions of UNSCR 1874 that tightened UNSCR 1718’s financial accounting requirements.

- Exhibit E: Chinese trading companies continue helping Kim Jong Il acquire luxury items, such as Italian yachts and European luxury sedans, in violation of UNSCR 1718 and 1874.

- Exhibit F: By last October, Kim Jong Il had probably begun to feel the financial strain of international sanctions targeting its weapons exports and its links to the international financial system. China responded by offering Kim Jong Il a multi-billion dollar sanctions-busting aid package. The package may have been shelved — for the time being, at least — after the Obama Administration protested.

- Exhibit G: A shipment of North Korean weapons to Iran, intercepted in the United Arab Emirates last June, originated in the North Korean port of Nampo and was then “transferred to a Chinese ship in the port city of Dalian, in northern China.”

- Exhibit H: A shipment of North Korean weapons to Iran intercepted in Bangkok last year crossed through Chinese airspace, and the New Zealand-registered trading company that arranged the deal was registered in the name of one “Lu Zhang.”

- Exhibit I: And lest we forget, China’s brutal repatriations of North Korean refugees back to the loving arms of Kim Jong Il and killing fields like Camp 12 continue undiminished and in flagrant violation of the UN Refugee Convention, which China signed. The repatriations themselves are crimes against humanity because China knows what awaits those refugees on their return. North Korean refugees claim that the hospitality of their Chinese captors includes rape, shocking them with electric cattle prods, the payment of bounties, and piercing their wrists and noses with sharp wires to string them together (they’re more cooperative that way). And for years, China hasn’t let anyone from the UNHCR anywhere near its border with North Korea to even determine the scale of the North Korean refugee problem. This sort of brutality helped Beijing to host the world’s most orderly Olympic games since at least 1936.

For China to make a credible threat to stop cooperating with UN sanctions, China would first have to start cooperating with UN sanctions.

None of this should really surprise us, of course. After all, China has long allowed North Korea to ship WMD components across its territory, may have transferred Long March missile technology to North Korea, and flashed a green light at North Korea’s first nuclear test in October 2006. Here, it’s important to remember that in China’s controlled academia, academics may have quasi-diplomatic authority, saying what the government allows them to say, but more bluntly than credentialed diplomats would. Now, here’s what prominent Chinese academic and North Korea specialist Shen Dingli wrote in the Far Eastern Economic Review the year before that test:

The development of nuclear weapons is a sovereign right to which the D.P.R.K. is entitled. Though outsiders may feel that North Korea should not go nuclear, Pyongyang is not convinced that it should voluntarily put a halt to its program. Besides, as long as the D.P.R.K. refrains from exporting its nuclear technology, it should be able to avoid a military confrontation. In order to persuade the North to dismantle its nuclear program, other countries should adopt a more realist, incremental approach.

So much for refraining from exporting nuclear technology. It’s still of no consequence to Beijing, whose support for Kim Jong Il never wavered in any meaningful way. A diplomat to his very core, Shen next implicitly compares the United States to Nazi Germany:

Of course, not everyone agrees with the assertion that North Korea is entitled to develop and acquire nuclear weapons. Yet these opponents usually reach their conclusion based purely on national or regional interests. They fail to understand that a peaceful world can only be achieved when all nations feel equally secure. The U.S. felt insecure when it learned that Nazi Germany was developing a nuclear bomb, prompting the Manhattan Project.

Shen continued to send the same signal to North Korea three days before its first confirmed nuclear test, writing here for the Nautilus Institute:

Our country has not many choices when it comes to whether or not the DPRK will conduct a nuclear test. This is because the Sino-DPRK security relationship is not a one-way street. It is impossible for China to apply excessive pressure on the DPRK. It is impossible for us to prevent the DPRK from realizing its fundamental interests while not harming our country’s fundamental interests. In the past there was such a balance of interests. It is still true today as “Taiwan independence” [forces] run rampant. Basically, our country’s work of persuasion with the DPRK in the 12 years that the DPRK developed its nuclear program had been a failure. The causes are evident.

Please do not fail to notice that Shen, not I, was the first one to link the issues of Taiwan and North Korea. Now for extra fun and 50% more veracity, reread Shen’s words, only think “Taiwan” when Shen says “North Korea,” and think “China” where Shen says “the U.S.”

For our State Department, there often seems to be no higher purposes than avoiding offense to the ChiComs, and when an apologist for and subsidiary of ChiCom Inc. like Chas Freeman can be nominated for an important national security position in the U.S. government, it’s enough to suggest a few guesses as to why. I certainly don’t see us gaining any cooperation from China by kowtowing — sadly, I mean this literally — and failing to impose real consequences on China for its continued support for Kim Jong Il, UN sanctions notwithstanding.

Granted, helping Taiwan to go nuclear would require some creative interpretation of the “Three Communiques,” among which was a commitment that U.S. “arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed … in qualitative or quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years.” I certainly do not propose that the United States transfer functioning nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles to Taiwan. It would suffice to quietly transfer the technology needed for Taiwan to develop its own indigenous ballistic missile capability, and to let Taiwan know that the United States would not object if Taiwan decided to close its nuclear fuel cycle. If we’re really serious about putting pressure on China, boosting Taiwan’s security, and giving Taiwan a deterrent that doesn’t depend on the U.S. Navy, then we should quietly assist Taiwan to acquire the technology to develop its own ballistic missiles, and do nothing to discourage its acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Just like China did for North Korea.

Joshua Stanton, a former JAG officer and editor of the Military Law Review, is an attorney in Washington, DC.

Bernanke’s back, the State of the Union is one long chiding of the country, and the markets continue their turmoil. It’s time for your weekly dose of markets and politics with Coffee and Markets, our podcast from The New Ledger with Francis Cianfrocca, brought to you by BigGovernment.com.

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One of the unwritten laws of opinion journalism is to never kick a man when he’s dead, at least, not until an appreciable amount of time has passed. The question is whether this can or should hold true for those who make their living by doing precisely that. The death at the age of 87 of pseudo-historian Howard Zinn raises this issue all over again, since very few academics have made a better living defaming the dead, with everyone from Columbus to Ronald Reagan, and thousands in between, being accused by the jocular old harpy of any number of hideous crimes, not one of whom, needless to say, being alive to answer the charges. It is, of course, the job of the historian to examine the acts of the deceased; and some consider it an equal part of their profession to pass judgement upon them. In the case of Zinn, however, he passed judgment with such slothful ease, and such obvious sadistic pleasure in issuing his condemnations, that one cannot muster up much sympathy at the prospect of the man’s memory dying by his own sword.

There seems to be some awareness of this fact even among his many admirers in the media. The major outlets have proven surprisingly tardy to mark the man’s passing, as if they were at a loss to find a way to describe him and his work without arousing the ire of their readership. This shouldn’t come as much a surprise, since the entire industry of Zinn (and it is an industry) tends to do everything within its power to cover up the man’s anti-Americanism, authoritarianism, and his flagrant abuses of his ostensible profession. Any display of the deceased’s actual beliefs and accomplishments, they seem to fear, might expose the fact that the emperor wore no clothes.

Thus far, the major obituary making the rounds is the generic wire-service report from the AP; itself a model of dissembling and misdirection. It pronounces that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States “was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003.” In fact, as the article goes on to state, “his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country” meaning, for those who can put two and two together, that the book became a bestseller largely because a generation of professors forced their students to buy it — a fitting metaphor for Zinn’s view of “the people.”

These generous and studied falsehoods are to be expected in regard to Zinn. Rewriting history to suit his beliefs was always his finest specialty, a fact he openly acknowledged on numerous occasions; that his eulogists would adopt the same tactics is not a surprise. Unfortunately, as we all know, rewriting history does not necessarily make for good history, or even history at all. Indeed, even in regard to his own work, Zinn was quite incapable of accuracy.

In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Professor Zinn acknowledged that he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter, not the last, of a new kind of history.

“There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,” Professor Zinn said. “My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.”

One can go on endless arguments about the right of the historian to express his opinions, to pick and choose, to emphasize or minimize as he sees fit; and there is no doubt that revisionism – the right to rewrite – is essential to the historian’s profession. What is striking about Zinn, however, is the utter banality of his ostensible insights. That all histories are incomplete is, in fact, not even an insight, but a statement of the obvious; and his “orthodox viewpoint” is at best a straw man of dubious provenance. Nonetheless, these two statements; empty, pathetic, and juvenile as they may be; essentially formed the basis of Zinn’s entire life’s work. There is perhaps no greater insight into the poverty of the American academy today, no greater testimony to its utter lack of depth or imagination, than the fact that it made this empty charlatan whose watchword was no better than the wisdom of an arrested adolescent one of its heroes.

Indeed, Zinn’s entire outlook on history, the totality of his grasp of the historian’s profession and his art, and the sole justification for his tendentious and consciously biased revisionism, was nothing more than the rusty cliche which holds that history is always written by the powerful, the wealthy, and the victorious. As an ostensibly revolutionary historian, writing a “new kind of history,” it was therefore the duty of the glorious Zinn to write for the powerless, the poor, and the defeated.

This is, put generously, a self-serving fantasy; but this is somewhat beside the point, since what is most striking about it is the extraordinary ignorance it displays of Zinn’s own chosen profession. It is true that the powerful, wealthy and victorious sometimes write history – and that they sometimes write it very well, witness Caesar’s histories of the Gallic war and Churchill’s numerous historical writings – but it is equally true that, from its very origins, history has also been written by the weak, the poor, and the defeated, who somehow managed this feat without the help of Howard Zinn.

Even the most cursory look at the history of the historians art belies Zinn’s ostensible courage and originality: Thucydides was an exile who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War from the Athenian, that is the losing, side; and he did not spare the powerful and the wealthy his scorn or vituperation. Manetho was an Egyptian living under a Greek empire, who wrote in order to convey the greatness of his conquered nation. Josephus was an exile, a defeated resistance fighter, and a traitor, propped up by the generosity of others, who happily bared the flaws of his own people, whose extremism he blamed for the war with Rome. Tacitus, while wealthy and noble, was writing without apology for a defeated cause, i.e., the Roman republicans who had been demolished by Caesarian imperialism. Indeed, many of the greatest historians of Rome, such as Polybius, were citizens of the Greek city-states the Romans had unceremoniously conquered. More recently, Edward Gibbon spent most of his life poor, much of it as a religious dissenter, and happily took the abuse that came his way for blaming Christianity for Rome’s decline. As for the “lost cause” historians of the American Civil War, they were no less defeated than Josephus before them, and whatever else they can be accused of, writing a “victor’s history” was not one of them.

Needless to say, counter-history, revisionist history, and critical history long preceded Howard Zinn, and will long survive his abuse of them; and there is a simple enough reason for this: The fact is, the poor, the weak, and the defeated need history more than their victorious counterparts; because to write and to engage history is the only means they have to reckon with the depredations of their condition, which is always, as all human conditions are, a product of the past. Despite the claims of his admirers, Zinn did not invent this, and he contributed remarkably little to its tradition.

Indeed, the best that one can say about A People’s History of the United States, besides the fact that Zinn managed to publish nothing else of any significance despite his long career, is that it may be many things, but it is not history. It is not even a revisionist history, since what it sets out to revise is, at best, a figment of Zinn’s imagination. It is something of a chronicle – more medieval than modern in its style – a collection of testimonies, usually presented without criticism and with strikingly little attempt at context or analysis. What analysis does exist is so tendentious that it usually offends the readers intelligence, and to the extent that the book has an overarching theory of the events it recounts, it is frankly a ridiculous one. Zinn’s thesis can be summed up in a single sentence: The “elite” – which is left unnamed and undescribed throughout – is always and everywhere oppressing everybody else.

Needless to say, this is not really a thesis. It is not even really an idea. It is a sentiment, an unfalsifiable article of faith that bears out Karl Popper’s merciless but valuable observation that vast explanatory power is not a virtue but a vice; since any theory that explains everything by definition explains nothing at all. Indeed, Zinn’s “elite” is more akin to a conspiracy theorist’s villain than anything that has ever actually existed or acted upon human history. However, this singular concept does do us the service of making nonsense of Zinn’s claims to Marxism. Many charlatans in search of intellectual respectability have attached themselves to Marx, and Zinn was not the worst of them, but he was perhaps the most amateurish. Indeed, if A People’s History is any indication, Zinn never actually read Marx in the first place. His version of American history has no dialectical materialism, no examination of the means of production, no analysis of class struggle, alienation, or the larger historical and economic forces behind them; there is simply a wicked elite going up and down upon the earth, spreading evil and suffering wherever it goes. This is, at best, vulgar Marxism of the type Marx himself despised and, at worst, a semi-theological form of paranoia. Indeed, the work that A People’s History most resembles in spirit is probably The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

As for Zinn himself, his semi-prophetic status on the left made still less sense. Often, it seemed that everyone on the left was creating the Howard Zinn they required for themselves; and he certainly did the best he could to encourage this phenomenon. He happily exploited the moral and emotional blackmail he could bring to bear through his participation in the civil rights movement, even as he excoriated it as a sellout in his book. He did the same with his military service in World War II, even as he painted the entire endeavor as criminal, forgetting, apparently, that one can be a war hero or a war criminal, but not both. Even the English language did not escape Zinn’s astonishing capacity for incoherence, producing a memoir and companion film entitled You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, a phrase so fatuous it does not even rise to the dignity of being wrong. It is a debatable proposition, whether one can or cannot stand still on a moving train; but the imagination strains to discover what possible literary significance can attach to a man’s subjective views of that locomotion.

There is, in fact, only one way that A People’s History and, indeed, the entirety of Zinn’s work manages to achieve any coherence whatsoever, and that is as something between a suicide note and a writ of execution. The suicide, I imagine, is Zinn’s own – his suicide as a historian and his suicide as an American; while the execution is unquestionably that of the America which was both his lifelong subject and the hapless object of the fanatical rage boiling just beneath the surface of his pacifist bromides. Ironically, Zinn is now gone, and the America he hated will, in one form or another, eventually write the history of him. His worshippers should hope that, when the time comes, the authors will be more generous than he was with the history of others.

Benjamin Kerstein is Senior Writer for The New Ledger.

President Barack Obama had to think, at some point during Wednesday’s State of the Union remarks: “Just think of the speech I could’ve given.”

If only the Democrats in Washington had done a few things differently — if only they had adopted more modest goals, or not paused to wait in an attempt to achieve bipartisanship, or just scheduled their return to Washington on the week before the Massachusetts special election — the speech President Obama could’ve presented would mark a triumph of a century of liberal thought about society and the way we care for each other. A new nationalized system of government-run health care would be a major step on the path toward the utopian aims of spread-the-wealth progressivism, an aim beloved since the days of Bray and Polanyi — a mishmash of plans, ugly and clunky, but still, a plan.

Instead, those troublesome Massachusetts voters wrecked the whole thing, and a speech that should have been a soaring triumph was turned into a 70-minute Scolding of the Union.

The happiest listeners were those who tuned in to learn about what horrible things George W. Bush did in the last year — at least they left those 70 minutes satisfied. As Clive Crook of The Atlantic has noted, Obama “followed James Carville’s bad advice in Monday’s Financial Times, dwelling at length on his poisoned inheritance. On CNN, Carville said the speech was wonderful.”

Health care went unmentioned until the 53rd paragraph of the President’s speech, and he offered little except one more urging to pass the legislation. Perhaps the truth is that he doesn’t have a lot to say at this point — given an opportunity to lead on health care reform, to set a definitive path in the wake of Scott Brown’s election, he punted. If a popular president is unwilling to lead on a matter that holds such enormous ramifications for a litany of centrist Democrats in the Senate and House, it sends a signal to those members, and they are taking the cue:

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said health care reform “is on life support, unfortunately,” and the president should have been more specific with how Democrats should move forward.

“He should have been more clear, and I am hoping that in the next week or two he will because that is what it is going to take if it is at all possible to get it done,” Landrieu told reporters. “Mailing in general suggestions, sending them over the transom, is not necessarily going to work.”

The president’s criticism of the Senate in the speech was “a little strange, a little odd,” Landrieu said.

“Moderate Senate Democrats, who give the Senate the 60 votes, come from states that have to appreciate a broad range of ideas,” Landrieu said. For a president who ran on post-partisan platform, “it doesn’t do a great service to then say everything the House caucus passes without Republican votes, the Senate should take. It is the reverse.”

So where do we go next on health care?  The zombie House and Senate health care bills — wandering the earth, neither dead nor alive — would cost in excess of $2 trillion over the next decade, even as President Obama renewed his commitment to cut the deficit. His own CMS director has demonstrated that they would increase, not decrease, health care spending, and they would not improve the quality of care.

Something originally conceived as a life preserver for small businesses is now a burdensome bill which would result in so many taxes, fines and mandates — nearly all breaking the president’s promises during the campaign, of course — that it would stifle a recovery and threaten to unbalance an already unsteady economy.

This was, in many ways, Obama’s malaise speech — chiding a displeased nation for setting their expectations too high, and telling us we would need to do a lot of this “change” ourselves; blasting a Supreme Court for their recent decisions on campaign restrictions Obama glided past in his own multi-million dollar campaign for the White House; wagging his finger at Republicans who, now that they have a paper-thin one vote margin to block some of the president’s plans, are apparently expected to govern as equals. If you’re going to boil Obama’s message last night down to one phrase, consider the slogan from one Homer Simpson of Springfield in his race for sanitation commissioner: “Can’t Someone Else Do It?”

This was a State of the Union focused on trying to regain control of the narrative after a year wasted in an attempt to pass a health care bill few Americans support and even fewer understand — not solving problems, and certainly not leading.

If only President Obama had a chance to give that victory speech. He is awfully good at those.

This piece originally appeared at Health Care News.