—HARRY REID
Advisers, Christina Romer, suggested that $1.8 trillion was
needed to fill the hole in the
economy, Obama’s top economic
adviser, Larry Summers, rebuffed
her, calling the figure impractical.
According to Noam Scheiber of
The New Republic, Romer pared
her proposal down to $1.2 trillion,
but Summers still considered it
too heavy a lift to get through Congress. The memo Summers finally
presented to the president listed
$800 billion as the top figure.
A top White House official told
Huffington that larger proposals
were still debated. But by then, the
official said, the president’s Hill
team had been warned that moderate Democrats wouldn’t go for
anything over $800 billion. They
chose to operate within those political constraints rather than try
to expand them.
Obama’s team worked hand-in-
HUFFINGTON 09.09.12
“OBAMA KNOWS
HOW TO SWIM.
HE’S NOT
AN OLYMPIC
SWIMMER,
BUT HE KNOWS
HOW TO SWIM.”
THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
strained Obama in the early weeks
and months of his administration,
demanding the quick and secretive
work he had previously decried.
“Obama knows how to swim.
He’s not an Olympic swimmer,
but he knows how to swim,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
(D-Nev.) said in a recent interview
in his office on Capitol Hill. “He
found himself in this huge river,
the current is all running against
him. The country has lost eight
million jobs, and he knows he has
to come up for air once in awhile,
or he’s gonna drown. And he does
that, he comes up for air in the
very best way he can.
“For me, he was always there,
even though the stream was
against him. He was always able to
get out of the water and help us. I
think his inside game was just trying to keep the country alive.”
But if Obama was forced to play
the inside game out of necessity, the
president’s progressive critics note
that he never really tried to see if
trying the outside game could work.
During the crafting of the stimulus bill in the winter of 2008
and 2009, for example, Obama’s
top economic advisers started
from the premise that there were
limits to what was politically
possible. When the incoming
head of the Council of Economic