On what set of national policies was President Obama anything other than a “centrist?” How many times did he “reach out” to Republicans? On the war in Afghanistan, education, health care, Wall Street reform, immigration, and climate change he bent over backwards to accommodate the opposition party. Yet the Republicans stiffed him on all...
Lost in the din of the triumphal declarations of the nation “speaking with one voice” calling for a Restoration of the Reign of George W. Bush, is the fact that on key policies — tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the...
It’s truly touching how much interest in America’s great democratic experiment that our esteemed men and women of industry, finance, and commerce have shown in the 2010 midterm elections. Elementary school teachers across the land might lead civics lessons by pointing to these salt-of-the-Earth hedge-fund managers, oil tycoons, derivatives traders, and outsourcing zealots who...
Each week The McLaughlin Group sits around in a TV studio on PBS giving us a clinic on the mindset and “conventional wisdom” of millionaire Washington elites. And they’re already constructing the template for the dominant narrative following the elections. While setting up a discussion, John McLaughlin quoted Naomi Klein’s “squib” on a new...
“All politics are local,” Tip O’Neill famously said, and the political smoke signals being sent up locally going into the 2010 midterms all point to systematic failure on the part of the governing party. Democratic constituencies have been forced to sit back while the politicians they elected are helpless in the face of an...
There’s been a lot of commentary about President Barack Obama’s failure to construct a winning “narrative” for the elections of 2010. In 2008, there were millions of people “fired up and ready to go.” But after a year plus of the Beltway-Rahm Emanuel strategy of never exposing oneself to political risk the grassroots energy...
Suburbanites and independent voters in Virginia and New Jersey broke Republican in yesterday’s election. Last night I saw CNN’s John King tell his viewers that this phenomenon could only mean that people are sending a signal to President Barack Obama that they’re fed up with “all that spending” in Washington. King’s assertion is interesting...
D-Day in the Class War
After a decade of stagnant or declining real wages, “bipartisan” schemes are proliferating to shift the burden of Washington policymakers’ own catastrophic mismanagement of the nation’s fiscal policies right onto the shoulders of working people. The press commentary has been abysmal. All “serious” thinkers out there on television or in print are in full...
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