"Johnny 99" - Bruce Springsteen (in beefcake mode)
Any thoughts on the State of the Union and its rebuttals?
I note that the Washington Post was disappointed that Obama did not address the need for austerity down the road. The people who write for the Post must wake up every day with a hard-on for cutting Social Security. It is a truly perverse obsession, one which at some level speaks to the need among elements of the American elite [the real elite; not people who go to movies with subtitles and read novels that aren't part of the Left Behind series] to inflict pain on working and middle class Americans, as if the central problem in our country is that these people have it too good. Putting morality aside, it's also stupid economics as Atrios reminded us yesterday with respect to England's current example.
On the other hand, I find this article that Lisa pointed out by Robert Scherer to be pretty bad advice in terms of what the President should have said. Attempts to relitigate the cause of the crisis at this juncture would have basically looked like Obama was looking to blame others for our current dilemma and although that may be fair, the electorate would view it as a failure of the person in charge to take responsibility. Such a retrospective perspective would have also subject the President to virtually unlimited potshots by the media talking heads. It would have been an enormous error and set precisely the wrong tone for the moment. Scherer also takes out of context what Obama said about the economy -- it's pretty odious cherry picking I think -- as the piece quoted by Scherer leaves out the statement he then made about the fact that the stock market rebound and robust corporate profits are not a substitute for jobs. Scherer also contends that the government wasted trillions in the bank bailout (which again, was undertaken under Bush), which is simply untrue. Lastly, Scherer writes in a political vacuum, as if the 2010 election did not completely change the landscape that Obama is facing.
I certainly agree that Wall Street is the villain in this piece, but I just don't see that that pretending that this is 2008 (or 1998 and the genie can be put back in the bottle) again is really a viable approach going forward.
What say you?
