When Political Reporting Ignores Policy

Clive Crook, who blogs for The Atlantic and writes a column for The Financial Times is one of the most intelligent--and least partisan--observers of the American political scene. Which makes his latest FT column an even bigger disappointment.

Under the headline "Obama Has Angered the Centre and the Left," Crooks demonstrates just what is wrong with so much of political journalism, viewing every policy decision through the prism of what it means in electoral terms. Politicians themselves can be forgiven for seeing politics primarily as a horse race; surely it is the job of responsible journalists to remind them that what really matters is whether the policies they enact are effective and how they impact the lives of real people.

Crook argues that "If Mr Obama had followed the advice of the party's progressive wing, he would have killed his administration's electoral prospects--and his own hopes of a second term--stone dead."

He doesn't actually spell out why he believes that statement to be true, but reading the rest of the column the logical conclusion is that Crook believes embracing the policies of the left would have further alienated "centrist" Americans. After all, the president has compromised with moderates in his own and the opposition party and still been branded a "socialist" by the far right.

But as Crook himself acknowledges, the dismal prospects of the Democrats in this year's mid-term elections are largely the result of a lousy economy. And his column doesn't begin to address the economic implications of Obama's decision to reject the policies of the left.

That's unfortunate, because it leads Crook to ignore the fact that the kind of stimulus package urged by left-leaning Democrats--economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is the most visible proponent of such policies--would almost certainly have resulted in a much more robust economic recovery than the one we are seeing right now. It was an approach focused on creating jobs rather than appeasing big business or addressing exaggerated concern over future deficits.

The weak stimulus package that the Obama administation enacted worked, but only weakly. The jobs it created barely made up for the jobs being shed by state governments and the private sector.

A strong stimulus package would almost certainly have worked better, on policy terms at least, since it would have put more Americans back to work more quickly. Regardless of what it did to Mr. Obama's election chances, it would have been a better policy.

But what about those election chances: does Clive Crook really believe that the Democrats' prospects would be worse if unemployment today stood at 7 or 8 percent today rather than 10 percent?