Chait to Poutragers: Its the economy, stupid!

I don't always agree with Jonathan Chait - but ever since he started writing about The Obama Method and coined the phrase conciliatory rhetoric as ruthless strategy to describe it, I've been a fan.

This week he took it to the poutragers in a column titled What the left doesn't understand about Obama.

Here he is summarizing the main issue that many of us recognize but the poutragers fail to see.

The most common hallmark of the left’s magical thinking is a failure to recognize that Congress is a separate, coequal branch of government consisting of members whose goals may differ from the president’s. Congressional Republicans pursued a strategy of denying Obama support for any major element of his agenda, on the correct assumption that this would make it less popular and help the party win the 2010 elections. Only for roughly four months during Obama’s term did Democrats have the 60 Senate votes they needed to overcome a filibuster.

Then Chait acknowledges that the focus of criticism has been that Obama hasn't done enough to improve the economy. The most recent outrages have been about the "cave" to extend Bush tax cuts and the debt ceiling deal. Were poutrage criticisms of those focused on their impact on the economy? Oops, no - they were not.

On the Bush tax cut deal - the one that secured an extension of the tax cuts for the middle class as well as unemployment insurance, both of which were highly stimulative:

There is a decent argument that the president should have refused this deal. But if you make that argument, you have to accept the likelihood that nearly a million fewer jobs would have been created and that we would have been at risk of a double-dip recession back then. Yet the liberal critics most exercised about Obama’s failure to secure more stimulus were, for the most part, enraged when he did exactly that.

The fascinating thing here is that when it comes to this argument, Obama was focused on stimulating the economy and poutragers were arguing a deficit reduction case against extending the tax cuts for the wealthy. Makes your head spin a bit when you think about it that way, doesn't it?

And on the debt ceiling deal:

And then, this summer, Obama let the G.O.P. hold the debt-ceiling vote hostage to extract spending cuts. I think he should have called the Republicans’ bluff and let them accept the risk of a financial meltdown. But the reason Obama chose to cut a deal is that calling their bluff might have resulted in catastrophe. And Obama made a point of back-loading the G.O.P.’s budget cuts so as not to contract the economy. He may have chosen wrongly, but he chose exactly the priorities liberals now insist he ignored — favoring economic recovery over long-term goals.

What Chait has done here is demonstrate that President Obama has been true to his North Star throughout all of this...getting the economy going. He has said over and over again that is what drives him every day. It's the poutragers who have been all over the map in terms of their goals. And that's because they are driven more by ideology than pragmatics. Here's how Chait ends his column.

Liberal critics of Obama, just like conservative critics of Republican presidents, generally want both maximal partisan conflict and maximal legislative achievement. In the real world, those two things are often at odds. Hence the allure of magical thinking.