April 8, 2010

Not on my talk show!

By: AF Editors

This past Sunday, David Gregory cut off Christina Romer, head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, when she strayed too far from reality:

MR. GREGORY: You mentioned the stimulus as a huge effort by this administration to deal with people who are out of work and to deal with a recession. And yet, again, I go back to members of the president’s own party raising concerns about just how effective it’s been… Would you concede that it didn’t do as much as you thought it would have done to spark recovery?

DR. ROMER: Absolutely not. I think it has done exactly what we said it would do. And I think the…

MR. GREGORY: Well, clearly, it didn’t do what you said it would do, which is to keep unemployment at 8 percent.

I’ve only been watching the Sunday shows for around five years, but my sense is that this kind of interruption-plus-contradiction is a departure from precedent. Why the change? I think that there’s been a general move toward more critical, confrontational journalism, spurred both by Hardball-style talk shows and by the blogosphere.

Of course, Gregory didn’t contradict every implausible thing Romer said. Here’s one she got away with:

MR. GREGORY: Members of the president’s own party, congressmen and women at hearings recently, have raised some, some real concerns about this, the priority that jobs has and job creation has within the administration…So the question becomes what options does the president have left to try to spur job creation?

DR. ROMER: Well, first thing I want to say is we have tremendous urgency. I mean, if you think about what we’ve done over the last year, the president has always made it clear jobs was number one. And that’s why within a month of when he came into office he passed the biggest fiscal stimulus in American history. We’ve done repeated things–the Cash for Clunkers, extending the first-time home buyers credit.

Yes, I know. The healthcare bill is really a jobs bill. That’s a pretty standard talking point. But Romer couldn’t even be bothered. She just spun a narrative in which healthcare never happened.

The funny thing is, I don’t think Romer was trying, in either instance, to pull a fast one. She comes off more as an academic who is new to the politics game and gets carried away with her own words.

Cross-posted at Conventional Folly