Circular firing squad time among liberal economists

Jeffrey Sachs: "At every crucial opportunity, Obama has failed to stand up for the poor and middle class." Paul Krugman feels much the same about the debt-ceiling negotiations. The endorsement of Obama by the National Education Association representative assembly garnered enough votes (more than 70%), but still less than previous endorsements. The guy's a sellout, people say, or he's an incompetent negotiator.

This is the label applied to the president who signed national health-care reform; who signed the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell; who pushed through the largest fiscal stimulus in the history of the country in the depths of the Lesser Depression; who pushed through a number of other, smaller stimulus bills that extended the employment of thousands of public-sector workers in the past few years; and who appointed two liberal justices to the Supreme Court. You can disagree with his decisions, but it's hard to say he's been entirely incompetent at getting BFDs done (to borrow from Joe Biden).

That's not to say I either agree with everything Obama has done or that he's has made the right political judgments regardless of the policy issues. In particular, I think he made three big mistakes in handling economic issues over which he had some control:

• He should have nominated and pushed early confirmation for presidential appointees to the Federal Reserve. 
• He should have pushed for the creation of an infrastructure bank as part of the stimulus, to create the structure for when the direct fiscal stimulus was going to be dying out.
• He should have insisted on the inclusion of a debt-ceiling hike as part of the December 2010 lame-duck compromise.

There are lots of other areas where I could point out disagreements. But far from being different from what I expected out of his presidency, I think these mistakes are par for the course. I expected Obama to be a generally liberal president, to make some political miscalculations and betray some stated principles while following others beyond where he should have let them go. In other words, he's a politician. Sachs' claim quoted above is just hyperbole: to pick one example, it's hard to see where the naming of Elizabeth Warren last year to start up a financial consumer-protection agency is "failing to stand up" for ordinary Americans. 

In the last year, the real surprise for me in presidential politics was Obama's decision to appeal the federal district court decision striking down Don't Ask, Don't Tell; at the time, I thought, "One of the few opportunities when you get to fulfill a promise by sitting on your hands, and you don't??!!" Obviously, the repeal after the election put Obama back where I expected him. That includes education policy. 

We're still facing a secondary economic meltdown without a hike in the debt ceiling, and Obama's decisions have fed into this, but this is not a matter of a moral failing on the part of the president.