"Dystopia" - YACHT
I continue to feel pretty damn satisfied with Obama's speech yesterday in all of its aspects -- as a statement of principles, as a political document, and as a tactical/electoral strategy. Yes, one can quibble about the fact that it buys into the evaluation of the deficit as a greater immediate problem than it needs to be. But it is, in fact, a problem -- there is a point at which revenues are going to have to be brought into line with expenditures and so having a discussion about it at this point makes a fair amount of sense from a political and public relations standpoint.
I particularly liked the unequivocal nature of much of the rhetoric yesterday. As Paul Waldman points out at TAPPED , Obama made the kind of straightforward, "values-based argument liberals have been yearning for:"
[The Republican vision says that] America can't afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can't afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about it. In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that's who needs to pay less taxes?
Just a hint of class warfare there (or at least that's how the Republican would see it). And even better was this:
But let me be absolutely clear: I will preserve these health care programs as a promise we make to each other in this society. I will not allow Medicare to become a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry, with a shrinking benefit to pay for rising costs. I will not tell families with children who have disabilities that they have to fend for themselves. We will reform these programs, but we will not abandon the fundamental commitment this country has kept for generations.
This is a winner as a statement of morality, politics, and policy. It might give a few Villagers a sad, but it will resonate with a huge swath of the American electorate, many of whom voted against the Democrats in the last election. Because, you see, white people like their government benefits -- unlike brown people they earned them and they want to keep them. So rhetoric about government "fraud, waste, and abuse" is fine and taking away money from the poor is okay -- we all know what they look like -- but touching Medicare or Social Security is truly a horse of another color.
And in this, Obama is deeply fortunate in his enemies. (I totally enjoyed that he invited Paul Ryan and the other randroids to come to the speech where they were no doubt expecting some sort of capitulation and instead got a fistful of the kind of rhetoric I quoted.) As I have noted before the electoral genius in Republican politics over the last thirty years had been to denounce the welfare state while permitting it to expand -- and to do so while cutting taxes -- a kind of right wing Keynesianism. A big chunk of the electorate ate it up.
Now, however, we have people running the GOP who have totally bought their own bullshit. Next thing you know, Medicare is being voucherized, cops, teachers, and firefighters attacked, one of our greatest and most loved presidents demonized, and the very soundness of our nation's fundamental financial commitments put in jeopardy. This is all craziness, and none of it reasonably calculated to appeal to any but the most hardened right wingers.
It will be interesting to see if the House Republicans really take a vote of Ryan's Medicare proposal -- it strikes me as electoral suicide, but at this moment I believe that they are so far down the rabbit hole that they will do it. And then a whole lot of House seats will have just gotten more interesting for 2012.
I think Obama has now -- with the extraordinary help of Ryan and others -- set the framework for the 2012 election. Now he needs to just stick to what he said yesterday. His approach is by no means progressive utopia, but it is solid, sane, moral, and well-crafted to appeal to a large majority of voters. If he has to take a GOP-imposed government shutdown in this next go around in order to stay true to these principles he should do it -- he, and we, will emerge as the winners in such a battle.
