PAUL KRUGMAN

The Focus Hocus-Pocus

Just what do people mean when they say Obama overreached by focusing on health care and not job creation? Comment

• Columnist Page | Blog

And why would failing to tackle health care have produced a better outcome? The focus people never explain.
Of course, there’s a subtext to the whole line that health reform was a mistake: namely, that Democrats should stop acting like Democrats and go back to being Republicans-lite. Parse what people like Mr. Bayh are saying, and it amounts to demanding that Mr. Obama spend the next two years cringing and admitting that conservatives were right.
There is an alternative: Mr. Obama can take a stand.
For one thing, he still has the ability to engineer significant relief to homeowners, one area where his administration completely dropped the ball during its first two years. Beyond that, Plan B is still available. He can propose real measures to create jobs and aid the unemployed and put Republicans on the spot for standing in the way of the help Americans need.
Would taking such a stand be politically risky? Yes, of course. But Mr. Obama’s economic policy ended up being a political disaster precisely because he tried to play it safe. It’s time for him to try something different.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 5, 2010, on page A33 of the New York edition.

Mortgage relief will not be forthcoming.   

It would be worth the banker's career to incur that level of loss.

I do not know the plan but Obama will walk from the ruins a hero.  No other result is acceptable to him, the smartest man in his rooms.  I find I do not object. I simply do not want to be under the rubble when he walks away.  I am looking at two years for him to get control and six to an heroic exit. A very tight program. There will be no third term without a revolution.