Obama's decision to call for a spending freeze is a disastrous mistake. It would reproduce the mistake that Roosevelt made during the depression, a mistake that triggered the second downward turn then. And it is politically tone deaf. It aligns him with the Republicans and sets him against everyone calling for a massive jobs program to pull the people [not the banks] out of the hole we are in.
At long last, I have concluded that Obama has lost his way. This is exactly the wrong thing to do right now. I am sure it is what Rahm Emmanuel and Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers are advising him to do, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong.
I never thought Obama was a man of the left, but I was convinced that he was politically smart and emotionally centered, capable of following a course of action even in the face of withering criticism from the right. Perhaps I was wrong.
