Messaging Comes From The Top Down, Guys

John Aravosis of AmericaBlog and several other bloggers I link to got together at the White House today to talk to the Vice President's point man on the stimulus, Jared Bernstein.  As Atrios would say, it quickly turned into an excuse for Applied Hippie Punching.

I guess what struck me as most interesting about the meeting were two things. First, when Bernstein noted that, in trying to solve the country's economic problems, the administration faces "budget constraints and political constraints." By that, I took Bernstein to mean that the stimulus could only be so large last time, and we can only spend so much more money this time, because we're facing a huge deficit, so there's not much money to spend, and because the Hill and public opinion won't let us spend more.

That struck me as GOP talking points winning the day, and I said so (Professor Kyle wrote about this very notion the other day on the blog). The only reason we're facing a budget constraint is because we gave in on the political constraint. We permitted Republicans to spin the first stimulus as an abysmal failure, when in fact it created or saved up to 2m jobs. Since Democrats didn't adequately defend the stimulus, and didn't sufficiently paint the deficit as the Republicans' doing, we now are not "politically" permitted to have a larger stimulus because the fiscal constraint has become more important than economic recovery.

And whose fault is that?

Apparently ours.

Bernstein said that the progressive blogs (perhaps he said progressive media in general) haven't done enough over the past year to tell the positive side of the stimulus.

Apparently, the White House has a bit of a problem with the whole "You know, we told you the stimulus had to be bigger" thing from the blogs.  Now, I'm not even in the same league as Oliver Willis or Chris Hayes or Matthew Yglesias, but I figured out that the White House was going to end up stuck in the middle of the road becaus Obama allowed politics to determine how much the stimulus was going to be, not pragmatism, and they pretty much said the same damn thing.  Aravosis wisely sees the bigger problem here:

The problem with the stimulus messaging is, well, the stimulus messaging itself. The problem is the White House messaging operation. It kind of sucks. And while Joe and I were living in Democratic exile over the past year for being the Cassandra's who saw all of this coming early on, nowadays it's pretty much accepted around town that the WH has been losing the messaging war with the GOP on a lot of issues. The stimulus isn't the problem, it's the symptom. We had the same issue come up with health care reform, a wildly popular idea that somehow the White House just couldn't sell.

And still refuse to sell, I might add. I'm going to go out a little further on that limb and say Obama's economic team has been the core problem all along, specifically Geithner and Summers.  Obama lowballed it all the way down, started at the compromise position, and the GOP talked him down well past what was acceptable to anyone who knew any better.

Meh, I look like furniture in a suit anyway.  So much for that White House invite.