Wait, There’s a Point in Here Somewhere

posted at 11:50 am on August 24, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ Economics ]   

Cranking out a weekly column can be a daunting responsibility. Just ask E. J. Dionne, whose column appears weekly — and more often than not weakly, as well — on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post. His column today is a classic example of a Dionne-style opinion piece: It has no real beginning, no end, and no middle.

The column, titled  “The Invisible Achievement,” is freighted with the additional baggage of being fairly riddled with abundant half-truths, misdirection, and absurd conclusions. Consider the opening two paragraphs:

The hardest slogan to sell in politics is: “Things could have been a whole lot worse.” No wonder President Obama is having trouble defending his stimulus plan.

If governments around the world, including our own, had not acted aggressively — and had not spent piles of money — a very bad economic situation would have become a cataclysm.

In this passage, Dionne offers no support for his claim, which he states categorically, that the economic situation worldwide would be much worse if governments had not intervened. That is certainly a debatable proposition and one a number of economists would take some exception with. Even more troubling, though, is the phrase including our own in the second paragraph. The independent watchdog organization ProPublica reports that at present “only 12 percent of the $580 billion in the spending portion of the stimulus package is out the door” — not enough to have a palpable impact on the American economy.

Having firmly established a foundation of sand for his article, Dionne continues:

“So everyone goes back to complaining about high deficits and the shortcomings of government as if nothing had happened. This is now creating problems for Obama on health care.”

I will concede that Americans are worried, and rightly so, about the sharp growth in deficit spending under this president. However, the conclusion that Dionne arrives at — that concern over the deficit is fueling people’s angst over ObamaCare — simply doesn’t follow from the facts. I know Dionne is aware of the town hall protests because just last week he wrote another deeply insightful column about how dopey and un-American the gun-toting protesters are. Can he really have missed the latest Rasmussen poll showing that fewer Democrats (41%) than Republicans (44%) now trust Obama to fix health care in the country? There is no question that the American people don’t like ObamaCare. There is a big question that the single cause of their discontent is that the program will further drive up government spending, though certainly that is a factor.

Dionne now switches gears abruptly and writes that “[o]ne person who empathizes with our president is Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.” This statement seems to come out of nowhere, but what will really have you scratching your head is this non-sequitur five paragraphs later: “Yet if Rudd praises Obama, he also praises Bush for acting swiftly when the global economy began coming apart in the fall of 2008.” Dionne is a card-carrying liberal. He spent the eight years of the Bush presidency vilifying GWB’s every word and deed and has had nothing but undying praise for Barack Obama since Obama first appeared on the political scene. Why he injects this rare moment of candor in an article escapes me, unless it is just a case of Dionne doing what professional pratfall comedians call stepping on your own shoelace. Suffice it to say, whether or not that was his intention, that Dionne seems to have mastered the skill, which may suggest that his true calling is not journalism.

In all fairness to Dionne, he may just be having summer doldrums. The Congress is now shuttered for August recess, and the President is on vacation with his family.  Washington, DC, is a political ghost town. The dateline of his WaPo article is SYDNEY, Australia, which may explain the otherwise out-of-place references to Kevin Rudd but also raises the possibility that Dionne is enjoying a little R&R himself in the land down under. Either way, he should try removing his head from the Aussie send before he endeavors to file his next weekly report.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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