Listening to Arsonists

BERKELEY – I had always thought that Barack Obama made a significant mistake in naming the Republican ex-senator Alan Simpson to co-chair the president’s deficit-reduction commission. Simpson was a noted budget arsonist when he was in the Senate. Indeed, he never met a budget-busting, deficit-increasing initiative from a Republican president that he would not lead the charge to pass. Nor did he ever meet a sober deficit-reducing initiative from a Democratic president that he did not oppose with every fiber of his being.

You don’t pick an arsonist to head the fire department, I thought when Obama named him co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

But perhaps I am ungenerous. Perhaps Simpson has had a change of heart. Perhaps he has traveled his own road to Damascus, come face-to-face with what he had done and who he was, repented, and wanted to repair some of the damage to America and its long-run economic growth prospects that he had caused.