Summers warns that stimulus battle not yet over – AP (2/8/09):

“Those who presided over the last eight years, eight years that brought us to the point where we inherited trillions of dollars in deficits, an economy that’s collapsing more rapidly that in any time in the last 50 years, don’t seem to be in a strong position to lecture about the lessons of history,” he said.

“We need an approach that’s very different from the approach that brought us to this point,” [Larry] Summers said.

Maybe someone on Team Obama can tell me what the difference is between this set of talking points and Bush’s Healthy Forests and Clear Skies, because from here, it just looks like the same totally dishonest framing. This approach is demonstrably very similar to the approach of the last eight years. Decrease spending on the social safety net, cut taxes a little for the middle and a lot for the wealthy. WTF does Summers think is “very different?”

I also liked this quote from the same piece:

Still, Obama aides claimed they were satisfied with the results, given the enormity of the challenge.

“In a matter of weeks, we moved through both houses of Congress a very complex piece of legislation,” Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said Saturday in an interview. “I don’t know if there is a parallel in history.”

In fact, Dave, there is a parallel in very recent history, and it’s called the USA Patriot Act. How’s that working out?

But back to the stimulus. I can’t stomach the Sunday morning shows, but I have been reading up on Summers’ little tour. I know that Tim Geithner is getting ready to further loot the Treasury to save his masters on Wall Street, and was probably too busy to carry Obama’s message. But it’s strange that hard-core neo-liberal Summers is the one they sent out:

One of President Barack Obama’s top economic advisers forecast Sunday a difficult struggle with Congress over Senate cuts of $40 billion for state and local governments from the administration’s massive spending and tax cut package to stimulate the failing economy.
[...]
Lawmakers were likely to begin reconciling those differences later this week, with Obama still pressing to have the stimulus measure on his desk for signing by mid-month.
But without the infusion of federal money to state and local governments, the country may still face “a vicious cycle of layoffs, falling home values, lower property taxes, more layoffs,” said Lawrence Summers, chairman of the White House National Economic Council.

Obama bitched and forced House Democrats to take certain spending items out of their version and has praised the “bipartisan” and “centrist” nature of the Senate version. Is he really in a position now to demand that the conference committee add back $40 billion in state and local spending? Or is this simply a repeat of what happened in early January when Obama paid lip service to liberals to protect his left flank. Seems like now would be a singularly bad time for all the DFHs to flood the Congressional switchboard in an attempt to get the more progressive members to stand up to the shitty “stimulus.”

And why is Obama on the road in Indiana and Florida today? If his plan was to get people behind his plan to force Congress to leave it intact, shouldn’t all the campaigning have been done prior to Ben and Susan’s Excellent Scalpel Session?