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My memory could be wrong and I have no dog in the legacy fight but that’s what I recall as being so galling about the GOP tactic. Obama administration knew/wanted stimulus to be bigger, much bigger, but had no choice to go with what would pass b/c delay would be deadly. (?)
But I also recall that Obama got rolled by Max Baucus, in particular, in pursuit of bipartisan support of health care reform.
But even on healthcare I don’t know that Obama’s blind spot was neoliberalism so much as his conviction that he could forge a bipartisan path. That he could soberly bring people together in a technocratic solution. And they rope-a-doped him with that for at least a year.
To me the question that the Obama tenure poses to candidates now is: which of your plans will you try and do first? Presidents typically are only able to do one or two big things per term. So health care? Climate? Election/dark money? The priorities and the ordering will be key.
Of course no candidate will ever admit they can’t do it all. But more probing into how they think they’ll role one success into the next could be very telling.
^roll
.@ezraklein wrote about the difference between true neoliberalism and cross-aisle and other vote courting. And the laziness of the neoliberal tag vox.com/policy-and-pol…
