Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - 10

Paul Glastris

Editor’s Note

Where Credit Is Due
Y
ou would think that the first law of presidential campaigning would be to take credit for your accomplishments. And yet the current contest features two men who are unwilling even to bring up some of their most important achievements in office. Barack Obama’s first landmark action as president, for instance, was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus—a $787 billion infusion of cash that most economists believe helped keep the economy from falling into a depression. The stimulus added as many as 3.3 million jobs and boosted GDP by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Weeks after it went into effect unemployment claims began to subside, and twelve months later the private sector began to produce more jobs than it was losing— something that it has been doing ever since. Yet because the economy lost so many jobs during the recession and unemployment remains so stubbornly high, average Americans don’t feel that the stimulus had any real effect on the economy, and indeed many think it was a huge waste of money. So the word “stimulus” never leaves the president’s lips. Similarly, Obama almost never talks about the actions he took to keep the crippled banking industry from completely collapsing and driving the economy further into a ditch. Beginning in the spring of 2009, his Treasury Department lured $140 billion in private money to recapitalize the nation’s nineteen biggest banks by imposing “stress tests” to determine the strength of their balance sheets and creating a public-private partnership to buy their “toxic assets.” These efforts got the banks on their feet at basically zero cost to the taxpayer. Yet Obama seldom mentions this astonishing feat for the simple reason that voters are still furious at bankers and think of all government efforts to help them as synonymous with a “bailout.” (For the record, the actual bailout happened on George W. Bush’s watch, though Obama supported it.) Romney, too, has almost totally avoided talking about his record as governor of Massachusetts. He gave twenty-five speeches in June and July and referred to his governorship only once. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that he doesn’t have all that much to brag about. Jobs grew in the Commonwealth during his tenure, though not by a lot. Unemployment went down, but only by a point. Romney balanced the state’s budget every year (which the state constitution mandated him to do) and did so without raising taxes, but he boosted a variety of fees, and bequeathed to his successor a nearly $1 billion deficit. He left office with a 39 percent approval rating.
September/October 2012

Still, Romney can claim one enormous achievement: a 2006 health insurance expansion law that has made Massachusetts the only state in the union to achieve near-universal health coverage. Since 2006, health care costs in the state have risen no faster or, in the individual market, slower than the national average. Polls show that two out of three people in the state approve of “Romneycare.” Yet Romney is reluctant even to mention this singular policy triumph because it was the template for Obamacare, which he has promised to repeal. White House contenders who distance themselves from their own records do so at their own peril—a lesson I saw play out firsthand in 2000. That summer I was assigned to cowrite President Bill Clinton’s Democratic Convention speech. My boss, chief White House speechwriter Terry Edmonds, and I came up with the idea of organizing the speech chronologically, a third on the past (the Clinton-Gore record), a third on the present (the stakes in the election), a third on the future (Al Gore’s agenda). We sent a memo explaining our plan to the vice president’s office. Word then came back that we were to make the speech 90 percent about the past. Hoo-kay, we thought, whatever you guys want. So we drafted a speech that was backward looking but triumphal. You may remember the speech. It began with Clinton’s image on the Jumbotron, walking like a prizefighter through the maze of tunnels beneath L.A.’s Staple Center and emerging to the roar of thousands of adoring Democrats. The speech that followed was a stem-winding, double-barreled, kitchen-sink recitation of every policy accomplishment and positive outcome of the eight-year Clinton-Gore administration that we could think of—and a number of others that the president helpfully reminded us of. “More than 22 million new jobs,” “the lowest child poverty rate in twenty years,” “the biggest expansion of college aid since the GI Bill,” “more than 100,000 new community police officers,” “set aside more land in the lower forty-eight states than any administration since Teddy Roosevelt,” “extending the life of the Medicare trust fund for twenty-six years,” “dramatically improved diabetes care,” “stopping brutal ethnic cleansing in the Balkans,” “brought Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO.” On and on it went, forty minutes of what pundits disparagingly call a “laundry list” but which the president’s supporters loved because, you know, that’s why they hired the guy, to get stuff like that done. The mystery of why Gore’s office would want us to focus the president’s speech almost solely on the Clinton-Gore record was re-

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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