All yesterday I watched what was either a Tim Burton or Mel Brooks movie. Sonorous politicians from the lowest ignoramuses, such as Texas' tea-partying Blake Farenthold, to the highest sophisticates, such as President Obama, kept whining in a fantasy nightmare of the GOP's dark creation while they comically suffered the very acutest anxieties at Washington's Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous.
Here was American democracy, virtuous model for an unvirtuous world: hysterical, combative, delusional, undeliberative, schizophrenic, suicidally ideological, and just plain nuts. "Fiscal crisis" were the high-frequency words of the day -- week, month, year -- when in reality we were experiencing a fabricated extortion of coup-like contours.
Except that of Republicans' making, there was no crisis, there is no crisis. Strike that. We have one now, an authentic crisis of everyone's making: we've spent too little in this, the worst job slump since the Great Depression -- and now we're intensifying the harm. Today's invented crisis of unendurable debt was still a year or two down the road; judicious minds would have informed our world creditors that substantial fiscal adjustments are on the way -- later -- but first we'll spend with Keynesian abandon, lest our fiscal crisis become chronic and quite possibly terminal.
But, I hear you: "Impossible," politically speaking. That's all too true, and that's also why I've resisted parroting the left's thunderingly unrealistic demands that Obama propose hikes in federal spending through assorted jobs programs. Save it for textbookish theory. What he could pragmatically do was what he's been doing: unleashing the admittedly secondary Keynesian relief of payroll tax cuts and then praying like hell that such a subordinate fiscal effort succeeds.
The president has led through a magnificent pragmatism -- on healthcare, financial regulation, reviving the auto industry, on catch-as-catch-can stimulus measures, winding down two wars. Yet to confront a hallucinatory "crisis" through a profoundly ill-advised fiscal capitulation is anything but pragmatic leadership: It is, rather, grossly counterproductive tribute to monstrous extortionists -- now inflated by a factor of your choosing, but an unmistakable factor nonetheless. The only mitigation is that friendly political and economic historians, years from now, will reflect that he, unlike FDR in 1937, had no pragmatic choice.
But he did.
He could have established from Day One that a clean bill is absolutely required. Period. Any variation would lead to a veto. Period. And -- "Make no mistake" -- all catastrophic economic consequences of legislating otherwise would be on the insurrectionist GOP's head. Period. That's about as pragmatic as one can get -- politically, economically, historically, temperamentally. No fuss, no theory, no coming to reason together in some alternate universe of magical macroeconomic voodoo. Just a clear, clean insistence on the sensibly singular.
Having careened around that, Obama could have opted for the 14th Amendment route. I've never liked it, I've argued against it, it poses tremendously ambiguous questions and suggests a presidential imperialism that's quite distasteful. But, in the snarling face of a treasonous mob of congressional cretins, its invocation would merely exercise implied emergency powers -- in a very genuine emergency.
But, that's academic (at least for the moment; stay tuned to the bumbling Gang of 535). The question now is whether presidential routes untaken will doom Obama's presidency. I think not, no more than FDR's unwise actions in '37 or his Court-packing blunder doomed his. Obama's record of pragmatic success in the first half of his term is ineradicable, and he's plenty of time to adjust and reset his course.