Great post from Ezra on Clinton's plan to bring back Greenspan for yet another go-round:
Markets need to be calmed, and Greenspan is their Quaalude. And while folks are making fun of her for saying that she doesn't understand Greenspan, not understanding Greenspan is no different than failing to converse with Mork. He speaks a made-up language. What're you going to do?
But the reality of the housing crisis is, in part, that it's a failure of conservatism, a function of regulators who refused, for ideological reasons, to do their job, and who let a massive portion of the economy outgrow the regulatory structure that should have contained it. What worries me about Clinton's personnel decisions here is that she's so set into the The Way Washington Works that she'll let this pass by, let Greenspan come back (thus reaffirming the idea that only this right-wing Rand acolyte can manage the economy), pretend this was just an unstoppable flip of the business cycle, and prove utterly ineffective at using it to create change in our economic policy making or domestic politics. You see this sort of thing in national security all the time: When the respected, establishment voices on an issue all lean right, so too does the conversation. One of the things a new president could do would be use his or her power to elevate new voices. But I've not seen much of that from the Clinton campaign. Her campaign has been hurt by its baffling reliance on the old triad of Penn, Wolfson, and Ickes, and the vision she paints of her hypothetical government appears to include Colin Powell and Alan Greenspan. That's not comforting for those of us who'd actually like to see these conversations move in more progressive, reality-based directions.
There are far, far too many people who got this issue right for us to rely on those who got it wrong - or worse, who directly facilitated this problem's creation - as we try to come up with solutions.
One of the main reasons - perhaps even the primary reason - why I oppose Clinton's nomination (as opposed to why I support Obama's) is that I think it is dangerous for us to continue to rely on the same small group of policy experts year after year after year. From 1980-1992 we lived thought the years of Reagan and Bush, and during that time a small and fairly stable group of people dominated the highest levels of our policy and political world. In 1992 everything changed. The election of Bill Clinton brought a new generation of people to Washington, and with them came some great new policy ideas. 2000 saw another shift, but because it was the son of the last Republican president, it was shift that returned us to the previous status quo. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Richard Perle... it was like a greatest hits list from the Reagan, Bush, and Ford administrations. The world had changed, but our government had not.
And now, here in 2008, we are faced with a similar choice. Do we want to elect new people who will bring in new advisors and experts, or do we want to return to the past for yet another administration with people from our past.
My answer is simple: new people bring new ideas, new experiences, and fresh perspectives. As Einstein once said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." But if we rely on the same people, we'll almost by definition be using the same kind of thinking. Reagan-Reagan-Bush-Bush-Clinton-Clinton-Bush-Bush-Clinton-Clinton would be nearly 4 decades of rule by two major political families and their associated experts. If our problems were small, maybe that wouldn't be so bad. But...
UPDATE: Even rabidly pro-Clinton Krugman thinks this is a bad idea.
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