David Brooks (on the "Obama Slide") apparently was wondering why Obama doesn't try to find a less "centralized" approach to his proposals.
Noam responded:
Do Obama's policies — both enacted and proposed — centralize power in Washington? Of course. No one who's fired up a television or Internet connection these last eight months could disagree. But the question is: relative to what? In almost every case I can think of, the administration has opted for a less-centralized approach to pursuing its goals than some obvious alternatives. Solving the bank crisis? Obama endorsed a convoluted asset-purchase plan rather than nationalization. Health care? True, the White House supports an exchange to cover people who don't get health care through their employers, and it prefers to see a public insurance option. But it wants to keep the employer-based system intact and shuns a single-payer plan, much less anything resembling a British-style government-run system. The environment? Obama supports cap-and-trade, which allows companies to distribute the burden of limiting carbon emissions amongst themselves according to which ones can do it most efficiently. The centralized alternative would have been a one-size-fits-all mandate from Washington.
All of these things do increase the role of government in the economy. But once you concede that the problems need to be addressed, there isn't much of an alternative. And Obama's approaches are pretty scrupulous about not increasing that role more than necessary, which seems to be the whole conceit. Sure, you could do these things in marginally less centralized ways. But, as Brooks concedes, that probably won't matter PR-wise, since, "Voters often have only a fuzzy sense of what each individual proposal actually does." So the idea that there's some less-centralized way of achieving Obama's goals that would be much more popular politically — which Brooks suggests — seems pretty unlikely to me.
