Last week, I argued that the post-election season is “a period of reeducation:”
Clinton’s nomination: What better proof for the Arabs that Obama intends to continue the reviled policies of America? Not Bush’s America-America in general. Surely, American policies will be tweaked and revisited and changed in some areas. But Obama does not intend, nor can he, change American policy in the Middle East in the profound ways his Arab supporters would like him to.
But even earlier, I wrote that Obama’s decision to support Joe Lieberman as Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee position was “only the beginning of a long, sometimes devastating re-education of the radical wing of the Democratic Party.”
Today, we have an opportunity to check in with the pupils’ progress. The official blogospheric announcement has been made. Obama, it seems, has a “Netroots Problem:”
Obama won a decisive victory and Democrats picked up seats in the House and the Senate. The GOP will have a very hard time, indeed, mounting a filibuster and they’re not going to be stupid enough (well, probably) to try unless the Democrats push something that can be painted as radical.
That leaves the left wing of Obama’s own party. They’ve been out in the cold for the eight years of the Bush administration and, one could argue, much of the Clinton administration since, post-1994 election, he was triangulating against the hard left and hard right in order to bolster his own agenda.
Obama appears exceedingly unlikely to repeat Clinton’s early mistakes. While Clinton came with vastly more governing experience, he never had a fraction of Obama’s discipline. (Or, for that matter, the discipline of a hungry dog let loose in a butcher shop.) Obama’s going to cherry pick policy ideas that he thinks will work and be popular, to the consternation of Republicans and the left wing of his own party alike. To the extent he has a problem, then, it’ll be disaffected progressives who are greatly disappointed.
But, as James Kirchick wrote a couple of days ago, Obama does not fear the netroots:
Good for the Democrats for ignoring these people. Allowed to exercise more influence over the party than they already do, the Netroots would have the same disastrous effect that the presidential nomination of George McGovern did in 1972.
It is good–and not just for the Democrats.
Definitions from Ronald Reagan:
Recession — When your neighbor loses his job.
Depression — When you lose your job.
Recovery — When the Democrats lose their jobs.
” Some pro-business and pro-investor tax cuts may have aided the process”
It’s too early;we have to clean up the balance sheets first.
That’s why he’s at MIT and not in the White House. Obama’s job is to keep the people on his side and to communicate his vision broadly. If he were to get into the weeds of how the government wanted warrants in financial institutions in order to fund the purge of illiquid derivative assets from their balance sheets so that they could enjoy the capital ratios they need to start lending, you can see how eyes would glaze over and people would tune out.
Since when was a state of the union ever the time for providing details on anything? It’s about big ideas and legislative priorities. It’s about wide-angle vision, not microscopic vision.
I’m surprised that someone who writes about politics every day would have such a limited understanding of how it works “in reality.” Ah, anwered my own question.
The BO’s wings & a prayer strategy will likely be as successful as FDR’s were. I think he’s looking extrememly vulnerable and will try to pull a rabbit out of a hat as the walls come down on him.
Simon Johnson may see a fundamental disconnect due to, perhaps, a lack of policy prioritization because he sees the choice as obvious: the agenda of health care, energy/environment, and education should take a back seat to the top priority of economic recovery.
But really, what’s the surprise from the left-wing president. No time like the present, while the political winds are at your back, to re-make the American landscape. It’s what Obama campaigned on, and the economic slow down has nothing to do with his policy agenda.
The only people surprised by Obama are those that viewed him as a pragmatic moderate, underneath all the campaign rhetoric.
Obama’s been in office for a month, and as I always predicted, the neocon Bund followers of the incompetent, floor-crawling drunk of a fake Republican president, George W. Bush, will seek to blame the Bush Depression on the president who inherited it. Unfortunately for your crowd, the American public knows exactly who did this.
Why would anyone think Obama wants the economy to recover? Obama, Bill Ayers, and George Soros don’t want to heal America. They hate the USA. Obama wants unlimited power. He can get unlimited power, to pass an “enabling act” and to suspend habeas corpus, only if there is a huge crisis with people rioting in the streets. All he needs is every Democrat and three Republican traitors.
If he can hand another five or ten trillion dollars to leftist groups, that will cause a crisis which will necessitate the printing of so much money that the yearly inflation and the unemployment rate will both exceed 40%.
He is a man in a hurry. If he can crash the economy before the Nov. 2010 elections and get his “enabling act” in time, he can cancel the elections and “temporarily” suspend free speech. After that, it will be a triffling chore to have the Surpreme Court find the 22nd amendment unconstitutional.
The well-funded Obama Youth will collect all firearms.
Saul Alinsky’s pupil has done well. And most pundits haven’t got a clue!
#7
Are you getting Obama mixed up with Idi Amin? Besides,the Centurions call the shots when the emperor goes crazy.
Hartland…is the needle stuck in the groove on you old record? It’s time for your boy to show that he’s not still smoking dope and get on with fixing things. Bush is gone, gone, gone! Now you guys own it. It’s going to be Obama’s depression if that’s what he drives us into.
Since 48% of the people voted against Marxism, and some big part of the remainder only thought they were voting for “Hope” and “Change”, we’ll find out what the American public really knows soon.
Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. – Mark Twain
Keith,
Wait a minute. That’s what the nutroots said Bush was going to do. They were wrong. I sure hope you are wrong, too.
John Hartland, of one thing I am absolutely certain, if John McCain had won the stock market would be very much higher than it is. Right now it is factoring in the current administration’s plans for the future, not the economy it inherited from the past.