Or option 3: there were non-sinister reasons behind it that were judged more important than potential blowback.
ETA: OP might also be interested in responses I got in a couple of somewhat similar threads that I started a while back. Somewhat devil’s advocacy, both, but they do seem to address some of what you ask.
Support for Geitner as Secretary of Treasury goes against everything the campaign stood for. He was treated like he was the only person capable of doing the job and his first press conference was a complete FUBAR. This guy was worth pissing away credibility for?
The stimulus package was a one-party smack down done in secrecy both from Republicans and the public. This was made worse by using attack ads against Republicans. Attack ads 3 weeks into a new administration! I mean WTF, This is his idea of bipartisan politics?
Obama is flying around the country in Air Force One promoting the stimulus package we’re not allowed to see and he’s making an ass out of himself. If he had any briefing at all about Caterpillar he would have known that they wouldn’t be hiring if his package is passed. He made the same mistake in Elkhart Indiana when a woman asked if the package would help them directly. Any briefing at all would have told him that it was a credit market issue keeping people from buying RV’s. That’s going to come back and bite him in the ass.
I’m hoping the idea that Obama will have the Census director report directly to him is a joke as well as any attempt to manipulate the FCC to enact legislation that would silence his critics.
Sure has… but no media outlet left of Fox News cares all that much.
They’ll be a little critical of him and his admin (mainly others in his admin) but they’ll buck him and his approval ratings up and he’ll be fine for a long time.
Prediction … Chris Mathews will be in the administration by June. I take that back… he’s more valuable where he is.
The slight change in the accountability for the census was just because Democrats didn’t want Gregg to be able to mess with it, no?
How nefarious. Turns out the dude was a huge asshole anyway. Obama’s main problem is thinking that he can work on solving our huge problems by including those who caused them in the first place.
You know, all those that Sam Stone had eight years of solid faith in. I think he doth protest too much at this point.
This is the type of baseless extreme criticism that discredits the right wing. The true rent seekers recently left office but not before securing Lockheed Martin’s place in the government food chain.
I think people lose sight of the enormous problems the U.S. must solve or at least mitigate. Correcting the catastrophic failure of the banks is difficult because of the size and scope of the financial sector. Contrary to what the conservative think tanks claim, the economic situation is serious, the dollar is fragile, and global disdain towards the U.S. is high. Since there is no longer a market for securitized debt, the U.S. needs to produce something to export. I think Obama wants to invest heavily in education, science and research to try and move the country towards high tech industry. Do the Republicans have any ideas?
The right-wing’s determination to politicize an unprecedented crisis for points is dishonorable.
Oh, bullshit. If you want to invest in education, let it go through normal appropriations. Don’t put it in a stimulus package that is described as needed for immediate impact, lest the catastrophe worsen. And I have no idea what your nonsense about replacing securitized debt as an export is supposed to mean at all, much less in the context of a discussion about a stimulus bill. It is not politicizing to question an expenditure of $790 billion that will indebt our children long after we’re gone, was pulled together in a short-span of time, that will effectively expand an already out-of control government permanently, and whose primary support seems to be, “This is a crisis! We have to do something!” No, we don’t. And we especially don’t have to do this. No one has provided any plausible explanation as to why the elements of this pork-ridden clusterfuck of a bill will combine to produce the effect intended, or any other benefit beyond those falling on the people who benefit from the pork.
God almighty, is this an awful bill–dishonest, misguided and with a long-term effect. It’s a spending orgy. If Obama thought leaving this in the hands of people like Pelosi and Reid would have resulted in any other outcome, and that this could possibly have been palatable as a compromise to the Republicans. then he’s an idiot. But if we don’t just play along, we’re “dishonorable,” eh? Well, too bad.
Just FTR, that’s what I’ve been saying to the people who have been singing Obama’s praises – often before he even took office.
Actually, I’ve been saying something like “Let’s wait at least a year before deciding that he’s a great President,” but the sentiment is basically the same.
Something needs to replace the dominant role the financial sector had in the economy. Obama wanted to build schools to produce jobs while investing in education. He wanted to fund grants for higher education which keeps universities open and professors teaching. He wanted to fund other educational programs that employ people while investing in human capitol. What you consider pork others view as an investment in long term economic health. Whatever the criticism, the bill is public spending.
I don’t believe the Republicans are concerned about what constitutes stimulus as much as they are determined not to spend money on education or any social program. When funding for education is introduced again, the Republicans will oppose it again.
Well, it’s bullshit if you claim the Republicans only questioned the stimulus. The Republican stance was a political tactic. The claims against the stimulus and President Obama get more extreme by the day.
That’s not what it was sold as! What happened to the dire, immediate need for a stimulus, the need so urgent, Obama told us, every day we waited was at our peril? That was for education grants? Are you kidding me? When does that pay off? Why couldn’t that wait a couple of weeks while the bill was debated? Could it be because the longer the details were out in the open, the greater the odds that people would begin to call bullshit?
You want spending to support education? Fine. Let it go through the normal appropriations process. It has NOTHING to do with economic stimulus. It is the very definition of pork.
Then they’d be right here! How dishonest to sell something as an urgently needed economic stimulus, then bake in pet projects and pork! How dishonorable!
It’s all political, from every Republican, huh? Not a single one truly sees any flaws in this abortion of a bill? Grow up. There’s posturing on both sides off the aisle, but there is PLENTY to be apoplectically enraged about with this bill. It is disgusting, shameful. Opposition to a $790 billion pork-ridden bill that no one can really say will produce the effect intended is not by definition political or dishonorable, except to people who find it most convenient to argue straw men and demonize opponents.
The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t want to fund education; the problem is that they only want to fund their own children’s education. Hence the “No Child Left Behind” act, which leaves behind students in poor schools, and the whole voucher thing.
The problem was the Bush Administration’s underfunding of NCLB.
In higher education, Bush cut funding for certain programs and schools. For example, Bush apparently doesn’t like social work, Liberal Arts, or black colleges. More importantly, public universities depend on state funding and Bush cut state funding.
Just to show the ideology and Bush policy connection, Margaret Spellings was Bush’s Education Secretary
But this porkfest is disgusting. Huge chunks of the “Stimulus” Bill do nothing, absolutely nothing, to stimulate the economy. Much of it is good stuff, perhaps very important stuff. But it doesn’t do a damn thing to stimulate the economy. It has no place in the bill.
I kept waiting and hoping for Obama to wade in and say something like “Hey, we’re borrowing money from our kids to do this. It’s for the stimulus and nothing but stimulus. It is designed to be fast-acting and produce quick results. I don’t want to see anything with a long term payback. We need job training for our workers today, so take out all the Head Start money and put it into job training. Get real.”
Still waiting … so I’d say he’s failed his first real test. He stood by and watched porkers take money from Malia and Sasha and did nothing. Not good.
Which was very disappointing for me, but I still support him. Why? Because he thinks about this stuff, he’s smart, and he learns from his mistakes. Novel concept in a President, I know …
This is a list of stimulus appropriations the Republicans found disagreeable. If I’ve done my maths right (no guarantee), the “pork” comprises less than 2% of the bill. That 2% equals about 6 weeks of what is currently being spent keeping U.S. troops in Iraq, again, if I’ve done my sums correctly. This is all assuming, if only for the sake of argument, that every item on the list has zero job creation potential.
As it turns out, it’s easy to imagine the benefits of many of these “objectionable” appropriations. For instance, one of the items Republicans found particularly objectionable was a $6 billion earmark to turn all Federal buildings “green”. Speaking generally about the bill House Republican Leader John Boehner said“The bill that was about jobs, jobs, jobs has turned into a bill that’s about spending, spending, spending.”
But surely it doesn’t take a gifted imagination to picture the hundreds, maybe thousands, of men and women who would spend the next few years industriously beavering away to make all Federal buildings more energy efficient. Solar panels don’t fit themselves, after all.
It seems to me that Republicans are picking on certain elements of the bill they deem ideologically offensive (“Global warming doesn’t even exist, lest alone require combating!”), declaring certain elements wasteful, and then using that to sully the entire bill. In other words, they’re playing politics.