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He's our Man...our Main Man. The Street
When Bill Clinton did this stuff it was surprising, only because he was the first Democratic president since Roosevelt to sell out the public’s interests as if he were a full-blown Republican. What makes it surprising in Obama’s case is that he has so little need to do so, given the crisis we’re in and the support and good will that it automatically provides him, not to mention the self-mutilation of the opposition party’s credibility.
And what makes it really surprising is that Obama not only doesn’t need to go down this path, but he is potentially destroying his presidency by doing so. There is a growing public anger out there, anger that is long overdue. People are finally beginning to wake up, however foggily, to who is the real enemy of America’s interests and who is the real predator with its fingers rifling their pocketbooks. If this populist rage is properly directed, we could get some sort of healthy outcome, like a reprise of the New Deal social safety net and a badly needed robust regulatory apparatus. If it is not, it might instead be miraculously used to breathe political life back into the very corpses of those who brought this storm down on all of us.
Crawling into bed with Public Enemy Number One against the leading wedge of a populist revolt is about as stupid an idea as imaginable for the Obama administration. Why doesn’t he offer another monotone denunciation while he’s at it, this one of pedophiles? Perhaps adding a heartfelt expression of how disappointed he is that there just isn’t more that can be done, darn it. Danged legal contracts! Hey, maybe he could also staff up his Justice Department with paroled sexual predators, too, precisely as he has done in the equivalent manner at Treasury.
And while he’s at it, he can complete the job he began by putting so many Republicans in the cabinet. The GOP has been busy committing suicide for years now, but has dramatically sped up the pace of late, trotting out clown-like figures the likes of which neither Barnum nor Bailey could ever have conceived, even on a particularly pungent acid trip. Jindal, Steele, Limbaugh, Palin, Palin’s daughter. Wow. If there is a Hell, you can bet Barry Goldwater is down there right now furiously trying to change his party registration. Best of all, not only are these losers the face of the Republican Party, lately they’ve taken it a step yet further and have been bringing out the long knives to eviscerate each other. It’s hard to imagine a better situation to be in for a Democratic president.
Which makes Obama’s idiocy all the more astonishing. Probably no one on the planet could rescue the GOP right now, except for Barack Obama. So why on earth is he doing so? Why is he throwing a rope to a drowning disease? And then handing it a cudgel? Why is he breaking into the vault at the CDC in order to cut loose the smallpox virus once more? What could he be thinking? Or is the bag of hammers thinking at all?
Republicans, in their usual fashion, have been highly successful at marketing disastrously pernicious ideas. So, lately, they’ve been out there associating Obama’s massively expensive economic rescue plan with wasteful government spending. In fact, it isn’t that at all. In fact, it is the only hope remaining for reviving this horridly destructive economy that the greedy Wall Street sharks and their political minions created. There will be no monetary policy solution. Interest rates are close to zero, and there’s nowhere left to drop. Demand from China is not going to rescue this economy. Consumer spending? Yeah, right. Rising property values as ATMs for homeowners? How very 2007. This is likely the whole enchilada. If wholesale Keynesianist countercyclical government spending doesn’t rescue the economy, it’s really hard to see what Plan B could possibly be.
But, of course, Republicans have never met a national interest they weren’t anxious to steamroll on the way toward achieving their own narrow self-interests, and this situation is no different. If you’re in the GOP and all you care about is winning elections (and, if you are in the GOP, that is all you care about), your only bad scenario looking ahead is for Obama to successfully rescue the economy. So you try to block him at every turn, and you lie about his program, calling a desperate last-ditch rescue effort straight out of the Macro Economics 101 textbook a porkbarrel exercise in wasteful government spending.
The public doesn’t necessarily want to hear that right now, and certainly doesn’t put a lot of trust in the source. But then there’s old Brilliant Barack, staffing his economic team not only with Wall Street hacks, but tax-cheating, TARP-blowing, Wall Street hacks at that. And then these flunkies tell us there’s just no way that public money can be stopped from being used as a reward for the scam artists who got us into this mess originally. And guess what? All of sudden, miraculously, the worst offenders in the Republican Party start to sound credible.
And if that happens, Obama’s already sinking chances of passing massive rescue legislation sufficient to end this nightmare will diminish fast.
And if that happens his chances of fixing the economy will fall rapidly.
And if that happens his presidency will swirl down the toilet.
And if that happens it will be Jeb Bush in a walkaway in 2012.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.
full article: http://www.counterpunch.org/green03202009.html
When Bill Clinton did this stuff it was surprising, only because he was the first Democratic president since Roosevelt to sell out the public’s interests as if he were a full-blown Republican. What makes it surprising in Obama’s case is that he has so little need to do so, given the crisis we’re in and the support and good will that it automatically provides him, not to mention the self-mutilation of the opposition party’s credibility.
And what makes it really surprising is that Obama not only doesn’t need to go down this path, but he is potentially destroying his presidency by doing so. There is a growing public anger out there, anger that is long overdue. People are finally beginning to wake up, however foggily, to who is the real enemy of America’s interests and who is the real predator with its fingers rifling their pocketbooks. If this populist rage is properly directed, we could get some sort of healthy outcome, like a reprise of the New Deal social safety net and a badly needed robust regulatory apparatus. If it is not, it might instead be miraculously used to breathe political life back into the very corpses of those who brought this storm down on all of us.
Crawling into bed with Public Enemy Number One against the leading wedge of a populist revolt is about as stupid an idea as imaginable for the Obama administration. Why doesn’t he offer another monotone denunciation while he’s at it, this one of pedophiles? Perhaps adding a heartfelt expression of how disappointed he is that there just isn’t more that can be done, darn it. Danged legal contracts! Hey, maybe he could also staff up his Justice Department with paroled sexual predators, too, precisely as he has done in the equivalent manner at Treasury.
And while he’s at it, he can complete the job he began by putting so many Republicans in the cabinet. The GOP has been busy committing suicide for years now, but has dramatically sped up the pace of late, trotting out clown-like figures the likes of which neither Barnum nor Bailey could ever have conceived, even on a particularly pungent acid trip. Jindal, Steele, Limbaugh, Palin, Palin’s daughter. Wow. If there is a Hell, you can bet Barry Goldwater is down there right now furiously trying to change his party registration. Best of all, not only are these losers the face of the Republican Party, lately they’ve taken it a step yet further and have been bringing out the long knives to eviscerate each other. It’s hard to imagine a better situation to be in for a Democratic president.
Which makes Obama’s idiocy all the more astonishing. Probably no one on the planet could rescue the GOP right now, except for Barack Obama. So why on earth is he doing so? Why is he throwing a rope to a drowning disease? And then handing it a cudgel? Why is he breaking into the vault at the CDC in order to cut loose the smallpox virus once more? What could he be thinking? Or is the bag of hammers thinking at all?
Republicans, in their usual fashion, have been highly successful at marketing disastrously pernicious ideas. So, lately, they’ve been out there associating Obama’s massively expensive economic rescue plan with wasteful government spending. In fact, it isn’t that at all. In fact, it is the only hope remaining for reviving this horridly destructive economy that the greedy Wall Street sharks and their political minions created. There will be no monetary policy solution. Interest rates are close to zero, and there’s nowhere left to drop. Demand from China is not going to rescue this economy. Consumer spending? Yeah, right. Rising property values as ATMs for homeowners? How very 2007. This is likely the whole enchilada. If wholesale Keynesianist countercyclical government spending doesn’t rescue the economy, it’s really hard to see what Plan B could possibly be.
But, of course, Republicans have never met a national interest they weren’t anxious to steamroll on the way toward achieving their own narrow self-interests, and this situation is no different. If you’re in the GOP and all you care about is winning elections (and, if you are in the GOP, that is all you care about), your only bad scenario looking ahead is for Obama to successfully rescue the economy. So you try to block him at every turn, and you lie about his program, calling a desperate last-ditch rescue effort straight out of the Macro Economics 101 textbook a porkbarrel exercise in wasteful government spending.
The public doesn’t necessarily want to hear that right now, and certainly doesn’t put a lot of trust in the source. But then there’s old Brilliant Barack, staffing his economic team not only with Wall Street hacks, but tax-cheating, TARP-blowing, Wall Street hacks at that. And then these flunkies tell us there’s just no way that public money can be stopped from being used as a reward for the scam artists who got us into this mess originally. And guess what? All of sudden, miraculously, the worst offenders in the Republican Party start to sound credible.
And if that happens, Obama’s already sinking chances of passing massive rescue legislation sufficient to end this nightmare will diminish fast.
And if that happens his chances of fixing the economy will fall rapidly.
And if that happens his presidency will swirl down the toilet.
And if that happens it will be Jeb Bush in a walkaway in 2012.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.
full article: http://www.counterpunch.org/green03202009.html
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