"The Futility Of Bipartisan Outreach"
In light of this latest bit of stupidity from the administration, this comment from Paul Krugman seems appropriate:
The Futility Of Bipartisan Outreach, by Paul Krugman: President Obama has tried — desperately, and far beyond the point at which it made any kind of sense — to reach out across the partisan divide. He has bent over backwards to be nice to bankers. He has clearly been uncomfortable with any kind of populist rhetoric, although that may finally be changing.
And his reward for all that is that Mitt Romney describes him as a full-on Marxist, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs:
[Obama] seeks to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people to enjoy truly disproportionate rewards are the people who do the redistributing — the government.
Reality just doesn’t matter here — which is why Obama might as well reach out to his base instead of the unreachable right.
Lucy and the football. The fake handshake trick. True colors shining through. Whatever. Ken Houghton has had it:
...the Obama Administration has been making it Really Effing Easy for Its Base to Mobilize since around the time Tim Geithner was appointed. That mobilization is just away from the voting booth and onto the streets. ...
There are two ways to get votes. You can take votes from the other side by appealing to the middle, or you can increase the turnout on your side by mobilizing the base or bringing in new voters (many policies involve a tradeoff between these margins, but the best policies appeal to both groups). It seems to me that Obama is losing far more in terms of enthusiasm and turnout than he is gaining by moving the middle (though it may be incorrect to describe him as having to move to the middle, unless it's from the right).
Whatever gains the administration made yesterday with the speech intended to bring back memories of FDR, it gave away today.
Posted by Mark Thoma on Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 03:33 PM
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