Thread by @delong

On MSNBC Right Now... As Always, Much More to Say than I Could...](bradford-delong.com/2019/03/on-msn…

**2019-04-05 12:30 PM PST**: [Ali Velshi: MSNBC Live](msnbc.com/msnbc-live-wit…)

### TALKING POINTS 1/

**Greetings**:

I bring you greetings from Laura Tyson, whose office I was hanging out here for an hour or so this morning.

The background is a green-screened one:

* That is not what it looks like here right now.
* It is a very grey, rainy, foggy day 2/

* This is the latest in more than a month of storms that have come down on us from the north.
* This is the first time in my life Berkeley has had this early-spring weather pattern 3/

* Global warming is going to be much more than just the-climate-marches-north-by-three-miles-a-year and we need stronger air conditioners. /4

**The Obama Administration and Its Misperceptions**

The Obama administration had a belief that cleverly regulating markets lightly could achieve the social democratic ends of strong and equitable growth

The Obama administration saw three reasons: 5/

1. The policies would work.
2. The policies would be durable and well-implemented because they would be acceptable to sensible Republicans.
3. The policies could be enacted in a straightforward fashion by broad bipartisan political coalitions. 6/

All three of these reasons have been proved false:

* There are no broad bipartisan political coalitions.
*Mitt Romney would not support Mitt Romney’s own health care plan when Obama proposed it as the Affordable Care Act. 7/

* John McCain would not support his own global-warming control plan when Obama proposed in the form of cap-and-trade.
* George H.W. Bush would not support his own entitlement-cutting-and-financing plans when Obama—to the horror of not only left but centrist 8/

Democrats—proposed them as a grand bargain with John Boehner.
* The wreck that Republican federal and state legislators and corrupt partisan judges have made of affordable care act implementation he still a wonder to behold. 9/

* Back to my first point: Market friendly policies work a lot less well than I thought they would.
* Relying on the Federal Reserve rather than on boosting government purchases to do the bulk of the work of economic recovery in the early 2010s was a disaster. 10/

* In a well-run society the top executives of Perdue pharmaceuticals should now be in jail for life for how they responded the market forces by addicting Americans to Oxycontin.

* It is a very different world in the world I thought years ago that I lived in. 11/

Thus those of us who have pushed for lightly and cleverly regulating markets to achieve the social democratic ends of strong and equitable growth need to:

1. wake up,
2. recognize that the world is not as we thought it was,
3. adjust.

That is all. 12/

**Caveats:**

Paul Krugman says: you may only be getting here now, but I have been here waiting for you for a decade.

Bob Reich says that you may only be getting here now, but I have been here waiting for you for more than a quarter century. 13/

Laura Tyson notes that the Clinton administration was different from the Obama administration:

* The left wing of the Clinton administration was people like Peter Edelman, Bob Reich, Joe Stieglitz, and Laura Tyson.
* By contrast, the left wing of the Obama administration 14/

was made up of people like Christina Romer and Larry Summers
* And they were both gone after two years, and not replaced. 15/

**Ah. [Ross Douthat]()**

Douthat: "DeLong thread didn’t take up that possibility. It degenerated, instead, into a howl against Republican fascism and a post-Protestant sermon about how liberal America can build the true and only heaven, the real shining city on the hill... 16/

Douthat: ...Which suggests that to reckon with the possibility that making liberalism a pseudo-church might be a problem, not an aspiration, we need a very different center-left from the one surrendering today..."

I really do not know how to take this: 17/

* I wrote "pass the baton" not "surrender". Douthat knows what I wrote.
* The phrase "true and only heaven" does not appear in what I wrote. Douthat knows that. 18/

* The part Douthat is paraphrasing is : "In the center and on the left we fight it with the opposed "Massachusetts" picture of American nationalism—a community engaged in an Errand Unto the Wilderness to build a Utopia that will be a City Upon a Hill, and we are all in this 19/

together with no special authorities or leaders because of the Priesthood of All Believers. Never mind that John Winthrop would run screaming from us: we are his children..."
* To attempt to build a Utopia—to make it so that people in the future will say "may it be as it was 20/

in New-England" is, John Winthrop would say, not an impious but a pious exercise.
* It is profoundly unAmerican for Douthat to pretend that there is something wrong with it. /21

Douthat: "The center-left’s signal political failure was that it never really sought to preserve a cultural centrism, which meant over time that its party’s approach to social issues has been dictated more and more completely by the left..." 22/

Here we have something that is less offensive and less allusive, so we can sink our teeth into it.

It is, however, very bloodless, very measured. Let's unpack it:

* You are all—notionally—looking at San Francisco, ground zero of the Democratic Party's approach to social /23

issues being dictated completely by the left.

* It’s where Gavin Newsom started handing out same-sex marriage licenses.
* I assure you the centrist political consultants were petrified
* The Republicans had been demonizing same-sex couples with electoral success /24

in the recent past.
* Ross Douthat was no doubt expecting an uproar and an uprising from the American people: "those sinful spawn of sodom and Satan cursed by God!"

* Yet that was not what happened.

* Americans are much better than Ross Douthat thinks they are, or /25

wants them to be—unless they are first scared out of their wits by Fox News

* Instead, there were lots of pictures of very happy people.

* And the dominant reactions were:

* "they're happy—good for them"
* "not my thing, but not my business" /26

* "I've been pretending to loathe same-sex couples so people won't think I'm a weirdo, but I'm glad to learn that almost nobody really cares".

In my experience, “preserve a cultural centrism” means:

* Stage a hate against whatever vulnerable minority catches your eye 27/

Right now that is:

* workers for Hobby Lobby and Chik-fill-a, who want to purchase birth control with the money their employees are getting a tax break for contributing to pay for their health insurance
* families from Chiapas who are somehow not seeking a better life but 28/

are Muslim ISIS terrorists
* transsexuals because they are icky

Douthat’s editors are not working for their readers when they let him get away with anodyne phrases.

* They ought to make him specify who he wants us to hate on... 29/

* He does say he likes Bill Clinton’s “tacitly center-right positions on immigration and crime and same-sex marriage..."
* We could ask Bill Clinton what he thinks about his positions in the mid-1990s.
* He would say, to echo Theodore Roosevelt bradford-delong.com/2018/07/we-hav… 30/

that "we have traveled far since that day..."
* Perhaps Douthat should let Clinton speak for himself... /31

**And a Word About Jonathan Weisman...**

Just an observation: in the 2000s Jonathan Weismann seemed to me a bad economics reporter

* He was one of those who went the extra mile to pretend that the arguments for Republican economic policies were stronger than they were /32

* In so doing, he got a lot of cooperation from Bush administration sources
* I believe they knew he would not ask them hard questions...
* This is a problem with American journalism, especially, I think, the _New York Times_ these days:
* Editors appear pleased and 33/

reward it when reporters work for insider sources first, advertisers second, and readers third, if at all. 34/END OF TALKING POINTS