Obama Adviser Tyson: "The Democratic Coalition Is Badly Broken"

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

In case you're looking for another sign that the strain of fixing the economy is taking its toll on the Democrats, I give you Laura Tyson, an economic adviser to Barack Obama during the campaign and now a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

"The Democratic coalition is badly broken already," she said. "We have Sen. [Kent] Conrad already eviscerating the budget of the president."

Tyson was one of the featured guests at a dinner Wednesday night hosted by the New America Foundation on the eve of a big symposium they held this morning on the global economy. Other featured guests included George Soros, former Loral CEO Bernard L. Schwartz, and Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf. Others attending the dinner of roughly 50 people included reporters and other Washington figures. It was done salon style with the featured guests making remarks and then responding to each other and to questions from the rest of us.

Tyson was responding to criticism that the Obama administration had not done enough to stimulate the economy—in other words, that the stimulus package should have been bigger. She said that the administration had accomplished what it could within the constraints of the political realities of the Congress.

She also added that other governments around the world needed to do more to help the United States fight the global crisis. "We don't have governments around the world supporting the Obama administration and we don't have Democrats supporting the Obama administration," she said.

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