Can Bank-Bashing Help Obama?

Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010

Can Bashing the Banks Help Obama?

By Michael Grunwald and Michael Scherer

The no-drama law professor is going populist.

First President Obama proposed new taxes on big banks, blasting the "twisted logic" of Wall Street executives who keep awarding themselves giant bonuses while resisting government efforts to recoup the cost of their industry's bailouts. "Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities," the President warned.

A week later, Obama proposed new restrictions on big banks, aimed at limiting their size while prohibiting them from playing the markets with their own cash. "If these folks want a fight," he thundered, "it's a fight I'm ready to have." In case anyone missed the point, Obama used the word fight or fighting 22 times in a speech the next day in Ohio. (See judgments of Obama's first year, issue by issue.)

The new proposals were in the works long before Scott Brown rode his truck to victory in Massachusetts, and they reflect fairly modest shifts in the Administration's finance policies. Even the rhetoric is familiar: Obama took periodic swipes at "outrageous" bonuses and "fat-cat bankers" throughout his first year in office. But the latest bank-bashing does indicate a new strategic approach to his second year, inspired by the same public wrath that produced Brown's upset. As the White House shifts its top legislative priority from health care reform to financial reform, it is hoping to avoid the mistakes of the health effort that have left Obama and the Democratic Party on the wrong side of a grumpy public.

That means more populism and confrontation, less deference to Congress. It's a shift from an inside game to an outside game, from passive leader of a divided party to active agitator for change. The idea is to take an uncompromising stand, make a clear case to the public and then force lawmakers to choose sides — as opposed to announcing general principles, letting Congress hash out its own details at its own pace and then desperately cutting deals to try to cobble together 60 Senators.

That was a bumpy road even before Massachusetts left Democrats with only 59; months of bipartisan Senate negotiations over health care reform attracted zero Republican votes, as did the financial-reform package that passed the House in December. And White House officials admit they underestimated how ugly Capitol Hill's sausagemaking process would look in the spotlight, turning a debate about expanding health coverage, controlling costs and reining in the abuses of profit-obsessed insurers into a brawl over "death panels," taxpayer-funded abortions and congressional giveaways to Nebraska. (See the financial crisis after one year.)

So now they want to draw bright lines: Are you with us or Wall Street, with ordinary families or greedy titans? They figure that if they can't get a legislative victory, they'll get a potent political issue.

But Republicans are already accusing Obama of sacrificing reform on the altar of politics, and it's true that the bright-line strategy could scuttle whatever chances there might have been to build bipartisan consensus in the Senate. For example, the White House recently leaked word that it considers the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency "nonnegotiable," drawing a clear contrast with Republicans and financial lobbyists on a relatively simple issue that polls extremely well — but risking a stalemate in the Senate Banking Committee, where the GOP and several Democrats have expressed doubts about a new bureaucracy. After health care, that's a price the Administration is now willing to pay. It's no coincidence that the day before Obama announced his latest push to crack down on big banks, his confidants David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett met with Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) watchdog Elizabeth Warren, the intellectual mother of the consumer agency and the most prominent populist advocate for financial reform. "They made it very clear that Wall Street needs to stop acting like nothing has changed," Warren told TIME.

It's also no coincidence that the President made his announcement while standing next to the unlikeliest populist advocate for financial reform, 82-year-old former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, a previously marginalized Obama adviser who had chastised the Administration for making insufficient efforts to limit the size and risk profiles of big banks. The White House is tired of complaints that its economic team — especially Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the former New York Fed president who helped bail out AIG and other failing firms — is too close to Wall Street. Bringing the legendary gray eminence in from the cold — Obama called his plan to ban proprietary trading by commercial banks "the Volcker rule" — not only lent capitalist gravitas to populist bank-bashing but also reinforced the message that the Administration will not be outflanked in its assaults on Big Finance. That hasn't always been the case.

Allergic to Populism
Shortly after Obama unveiled a $117 billion plan to tax the riskier liabilities of larger financial firms, Geithner hosted a dinner for bankers. A few of them grumbled about Big Government, class warfare and the unfairness of scapegoating financial institutions that already repaid their bailout money while GM and Chrysler keep hemorrhaging taxpayer cash. But one midsize-bank CEO suggested the tax was a reasonable surcharge on too-big-to-fail conglomerates that benefit from an implicit guarantee of federal help in a crisis. "If I fail, the FDIC shuts me down," he said. Then he gestured at a big-bank CEO. "If he fails, the Fed asks how it can help."

Read "Bank CEOs Continue to Fight Financial Reform."

See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers.

It's a telling story. For one thing, it's a reminder that Geithner is the kind of guy who hosts dinners for bankers. He's not a populist; he's allergic to populists, and so are his aides. Behind closed doors, Treasury officials can sound like their MoveOn.org caricatures, griping about "wacko populists" who use "anticapitalist rhetoric" to "extract their pound of flesh from the Street" — even making excuses for the megabankers who no-showed a recent White House meeting with Obama. ("I wouldn't say they blew him off," said one Treasury aide.) Geithner has opposed proposals to tax Wall Street bonuses as well as financial transactions, infuriating the left. And he made quite a few of those how-can-we-help calls to floundering bankers when he was at the Fed, providing a juicy target for the right.

And yet Obama's bank tax — designed not only to make taxpayers whole but also to discourage excessive risk-taking — came from Geithner. And so did most of the Administration's plans to address the too-big-to-fail problem, create an independent consumer agency for financial products and otherwise overhaul the regulatory system that failed so dramatically in 2008. Geithner sees big banks not as evil empires to be toppled but as moneymaking machines to be restrained, so that the panic and bailouts of two years ago are never repeated. Just because it's populist, he likes to say, doesn't mean it's wrong. (See award-winning pictures of the fallout from the financial meltdown.)

And as was conspicuously not the case with health care reform, the Administration has laid out specific changes it wants to see in financial oversight. In June, Geithner released an 88-page paper with proposals to address just about everything that went wrong before the meltdown, from unregulated brokers who peddled toxic subprime mortgages with brutal fine print to in-the-tank ratings agencies that vouched for house-of-cards financial instruments they didn't even understand. He proposed much tougher oversight of derivatives, hedge funds and nonbank financial firms like AIG, as well as so-called resolution authority to help public officials wind down failed behemoths like Lehman Brothers during a crisis without triggering a panic. Geithner then shipped hundreds of pages of legislative language to the Hill.

The bill the House passed in December closely tracks the Treasury proposals; Geithner's aides say they got at least 80% of what they wanted, including the stand-alone consumer agency, an easy-to-understand innovation for Americans who think mortgages and credit cards should be as safe as toasters. Many of the differences were technical or turf-based: how to structure the resolution authority and regulate systemic risks, a loophole exempting "industrial loan companies" from various regulations, more loopholes shielding community banks and auto dealers (known for their pull with local Congressmen) from the new consumer agency's direct oversight. House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank points out that the Republican alternative to the bill consisted of ending TARP and otherwise maintaining the status quo; he's surprised the GOP hasn't paid a political price. "I'm disappointed with the zeitgeist," Frank says. "The Republicans are so extreme they couldn't help themselves; they actually proposed doing nothing. I would've thought refusing to fix a dysfunctional system would be unpopular." (See how Americans are spending now.)

Republicans say they haven't seen any downside yet to opposing reform. Brown actually stepped into Obama's populist trap by opposing the bank tax, and it didn't seem to help his opponent, Martha Coakley, even though internal polling gave her a 21-point advantage when it came to "taking on Wall Street." Why? "People thought Democrats in Washington would not deliver on these issues," says her pollster, Celinda Lake.

In fact, Democrats in Washington and even within the Administration were at odds over dozens of provisions. As with health care, there are serious differences on financial reform between the House and the Senate, and the Democratic caucus within the Senate is again divided. And as the House bill got watered down a bit, some reformers saw Treasury's fingerprints. For example, Michael Greenberger, a policy adviser to Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of union, consumer and environmental groups, says Treasury lobbied "vigorously" for loopholes exempting certain over-the-counter derivatives from new regulations, a key objective of centrist New Democrats who took their concerns to Geithner — and one shared by the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and big banks.

But for critics who believed the Administration was reluctant to crack down on Wall Street, Volcker became the proof that wasn't in the pudding — the monetary version of the "most trusted name in news" who suddenly sounded like a Daily Kos blogger. If Obama really wanted to stop banks from getting too big to fail, why didn't he take Volcker's advice about how to stop them from getting too big? If Obama really wanted to stop Wall Street's excessive risk-taking, why didn't he take Volcker's advice to stop federally insured banks from gambling on their own accounts? And where was Volcker anyway?

Back in Vogue
Volcker was living in New York City, getting engaged to his longtime assistant, giving speeches around the world, making wry comments about the uselessness of financial innovation and the remorselessness of Wall Street. He was also making cagey references to his lack of influence with Obama, for whom he was chairing an obscure economic-recovery board. Congressman Paul Kanjorski says that last March, when he pitched Volcker on a plan to let regulators break up big banks that threatened the financial system, the former Fed chair said, "I'm out of vogue right now in the White House ... but I agree." Volcker secured his walk-on-water reputation by taming runaway inflation in the late 1970s, jacking up interest rates and ignoring intense public pressure to reverse course. His grandpa-in-the-attic status in Obamaworld seemed to suggest an Administration too cozy with the Street.

Read "Can Obama Profit from a Wall Street Crackdown?"

Read "Bank Earnings: Economic Woes Persist."

In fact, while Volcker did have some policy disagreements with Geithner and National Economic Council chairman Larry Summers — who were not eager to dismantle large banks and did not see how proprietary trading contributed to the crisis — those ideas had support from White House economists like Christina Romer and Austan Goolsbee of the Council of Economic Advisers and Jared Bernstein in Vice President Joe Biden's office. Volcker was never really persona non grata; he's friendly with Biden, and Goolsbee says Volcker spoke "extensively and repeatedly" with all the key players — including Obama. Still, White House officials were increasingly frustrated that they weren't getting credit for going after Wall Street. "It came up in every meeting: This bank stuff is killing us and killing us," a Treasury official told TIME.

The political aides were eager to adopt a more populist tone, urging Treasury to give them something they could use. The bank tax was already in the works, but after Volcker made his case at a White House meeting in October, the rest of the Administration started shifting his way. Giant firms like Goldman Sachs were raking in record profits, and financiers ranging from British central banker Mervyn King to former Citigroup chairman John Reed were endorsing the Volcker rule. (See the worst business deals of 2009.)

By late December, Obama's entire economic team agreed to support the rule, along with limits on the size and scope of banks that go beyond the amendment Kanjorski drew up. Geithner would have preferred to limit risk-taking through tougher rules on leverage and capital — and he's still planning a push on that front — but in an election year, it was easy to see the value of having Volcker inside the tent. "The narrative is changing," Warren says. "In 2010, Congress will have a basic choice between taking the side of banks and taking the side of families."

The question is: Does the new populism make reform more or less likely?

Fight or Fix?
"Your bosses are sociopaths! A bunch of Ted Bundys in $10,000 suits!" The words were hurled by an unnamed Democratic Congressman at a bank lobbyist who must also remain anonymous. Suffice it to say the lobbyist is getting used to hostile greetings. "We get it: we're al-Qaeda, and nobody wants to be seen with us," he says. "Obviously, we're going to take some abuse in 2010." Like most bank lobbyists, he says he supports financial reform — as long as it doesn't include a consumer agency or a bunch of other provisions that Obama supports — but that hasn't stopped his industry from spending millions of dollars to kill it. What's interesting is that now, for the first time, the lobbyist thinks reform is going to stall. "I'm not sure I see the path anymore," he says. (See 10 things that have and haven't changed during Obama's first year.)

The problem, as usual, is the Senate — and, in an election year, the calendar. Republicans are already suggesting that Obama's belated push for the Volcker rule and other add-ons will require new hearings and more delay, and that its line-in-the-sand approach to the consumer agency is a formula for gridlock. Meanwhile, in the post-Massachusetts political climate — and with so much industry cash sloshing around in Washington — centrist Democrats seem to fear getting tagged as Obama liberals more than they fear getting tagged as Wall Street water carriers. And the White House would rather see reform blocked by Republican recalcitrance it can exploit at the polls than watch another round of interminable horse-trading that will ultimately be blamed on Obama.

This is not to say the White House wants an issue rather than a bill. It wants both, especially if health care dies and leaves Democrats short on achievements to brag about in 2010. It's simply decided that the most plausible path to a bill is to warn the public that the financial system is still a ticking bomb, and to try to make opposition to strong reform tantamount to support for the terrorists in fancy suits. The problem is that on an issue this complex, with so many contentious provisions and alternative proposals floating around, naysayers are always going to be able to find a populist excuse to say nay. For example, some in both parties have turned to Fed-bashing, trying to strip the agency's regulatory powers and opposing Chairman Ben Bernanke's nomination for a second term. Who knows? In 2010, "Bailout Ben" could be just as potent a populist issue as "financial reform."

Financial reform, like health care reform, is truly complex. It's hard to explain controversies over pre-emption or end users or proprietary trading; as another Wall Street lobbyist puts it, "Americans don't care whether Morgan Stanley keeps its prop desk." Obama knows he has little chance to transform the system if regulatory reform gets bogged down over health-care-style intricacies. The good news for Obama is that nobody claims our financial oversight is the best in the world. He may have a chance for reform if he can boil it down to one simple question: yes or no.

Read "Is Obama's Financial-Reform Plan Bold Enough?"

See the best pictures of 2009.

Obama's Domestic Agenda Teeters

By Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie
Sunday, July 19, 2009

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president's approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to "accomplish too much," and 57 percent think the country is on the "wrong track."

From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. "Give it to me!" the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to "solve problems" and not "gripe" about the economic hand he was dealt.

Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.

So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il's health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America's best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party's left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP.

And perhaps most important, as with Carter, his specific policies are genuinely unpopular. The auto bailout -- which, incidentally, is illegal, springing as it has from a fund specifically earmarked for financial institutions -- has been reviled from the get-go, with opposition consistently polling north of 60 percent. Majorities have said no to bank bailouts and to cap and trade if it would make electricity significantly more expensive.

According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, more than 80 percent are concerned that health-care reform will increase costs or diminish the quality of care. Even as two House committees passed a reform bill last week, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned that the proposal "significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care costs" and dramatically raises the cost "curve." This sort of voter and expert feedback can't be comforting to the president.

As writers who inveighed against last year's GOP candidate and called George W. Bush's presidency a "disaster," we're equal-opportunity critics. As taxpayers with children and hence some small, almost certainly unrecoverable stake in this country's future (not to mention that of General Motors, Chrysler and AIG), we write with skin in the game and the fear that our current leader will indeed start busting out the 1970s cardigans.

Of course, it's too early to write Obama off. Just a few years ago, Republicans and Democrats alike were puzzling over the "permanent" GOP majority. And less than two years ago, the smart set was buying advance tickets for Rudy vs. Hillary. Yet there's no question that Obama's massively ambitious domestic agenda is at a fork in the road: One route leads to Plains, Ga., and early retirement, the other to Hope, Ark., a second term and the revitalization of the American economy.

The key to understanding Obama's predicament is to realize that while he ran convincingly as a repudiation of Bush, he is in fact doubling down on his predecessor's big-government policies and perpetual crisis-mongering. From the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists to gays in the military to bailing out industries large and small, Obama has been little more than the keeper of the Bush flame. Indeed, it took the two of them to create the disaster that is the 2009 budget, racking up a deficit that has already crossed the historic $1 trillion mark with almost three months left in the fiscal year.

Beyond pushing the "emergency" $787 billion stimulus package (even while acknowledging that the vast majority of funds would be released in 2010 and beyond), Obama signed a $410 billion omnibus spending bill and a $106 billion supplemental spending bill to cover "emergency" expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, improbably, a "cash for clunkers" program). Despite pledges to achieve a "net spending cut" by targeting earmarks and wasteful spending, Obama rubber-stamped more than 9,000 earmarks and asked government agencies to trim a paltry $100 million in spending this year, 0.003 percent of the federal budget.

In the same way that Bush claimed to be cutting government even while increasing real spending by more than 70 percent, Obama seems to believe that saying one thing, while doing another, somehow makes it so. His first budget was titled "A New Era of Fiscal Responsibility," even as his own projections showed a decade's worth of historically high deficits. He vowed no new taxes on 95 percent of Americans, then jacked up cigarette taxes and indicated a willingness to consider new health-care taxes as part of his reform package. He said he didn't want to take over General Motors on the day that he took over General Motors.

Such is the extent of Obama's magical realism that he can promise to post all bills on the Internet five days before signing them, serially break that promise and then, when announcing that he wouldn't even try anymore, have a spokesman present the move as yet another example of "providing the American people more transparency in government."

What the new president has not quite grasped is that the American people understand both irony and cognitive dissonance. Instead, Obama has mistaken his personal popularity for a national predilection toward emergency-driven central planning. He doesn't get that Americans prefer the slower process of building political consensus based on reality, and at least a semblance of rational deliberation rather than one sky-is-falling legislative session after another.

On this last point, Obama is a perfect extension of Bush's worst trait as president. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration pushed through the Patriot Act, a massive, transformative piece of legislation that plainly went unread even as Congress overwhelmingly voted aye. Bush whipped up an atmosphere of crisis every time he sensed a restive Congress or a dissatisfied electorate. And at the end of his tenure, he rammed through the TARP bailout at warp speed, arguing that the United States yet again faced catastrophe at the hands of an existential threat.

But contrary to the dreams of dystopians and paranoiacs everywhere, there simply is no outside threat to the American way of life. No country can challenge us militarily; no economic system stands to dislodge capitalism; no terrorist group can do anything more than land the occasional (if horrendous) blow. And as history has shown, the U.S. economy is resilient enough to overcome the worst-laid plans from the White House.

Bush learned the hard way that running government as a perpetual crisis machine leads to bad policy and public fatigue. Obama's insistence on taking advantage of a crisis to push through every item on the progressive checklist right now is threatening to complete that cycle within his first year.

What are his options? First, stop doing harm. Throwing money all over the economy (and especially to sectors that match up with Democratic interests) is the shortest path to what Margaret Thatcher described as the inherent flaw in socialism: Eventually you run out of other people's money.

No matter how many fantastical multipliers Obama ascribes to government spending, with each day comes refutation of the administration's promises on jobs and economic growth. Even his chief source on the topic, economic adviser Christina Romer, now grants that calculating jobs "created or saved" by Team Obama is simply impossible.

Which leads to the second point: Stop it with the magical realism already.

Save terms such as "fiscal responsibility" for policies that at least minimally resemble that notion. Don't pretend that a budget that doubles the national debt in five years and triples it in 10 is the work of politicians tackling "the difficult choices." Americans have a pretty good (if slow-to-activate) B.S. detector, and the more you mislead them now, the worse they'll punish you later. Toward that end, producing real transparency instead of broken promises is the first step toward building credibility.

That the administration is now spending millions of dollars to revamp its useless stimulus-tracking site Recovery.gov is one more indication that, post-Bush, the White House still thinks of citizens as marks to be rolled.

Finally, it's time to connect the poster boy for hope to the original Man From Hope. After Bill Clinton bit off more domestic policy than even he could chew, leading to a Republican rout in the midterm elections of 1994, the 42nd president refocused his political intelligence on keeping his ambitions and, as a result, the size of government growth, limited. Though there is much to complain about in his record, the broad prosperity and mostly sound economic policy under his watch aren't included.

This shouldn't be a difficult task for Obama. As a political animal, he has always resembled Clinton more than Carter. This might help him avoid the Carteresque pileup he's driving into. Far more important, it just might help the rest of us.

Nick Gillespie is the editor of Reason.com and Reason.tv. Matt Welch is editor of Reason magazine. They will discuss this article online at 11 a.m. on Monday at www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.