Re: The new Great Communicator ... isn't

hey dickhead, over here shithead, pay attention, you didn't even read this
before you posted it ,

you just thought it was anti-obama and copied and pasted it,

shithead, you're a fucking moron, go get one of the neighborhood
teenagers and tell them I said to kick your ass


"SordoT" <sordoT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:6v13hsFhmi04U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The new Great Communicator ... isn't

Obama is stumbling in the stimulus debate -- and public support is
dropping -- because for 30 years Republicans have lied about the role of
government. Now he's got to tell the truth.

By Joan Walsh
http://www.salon.com
Feb. 04, 2009 |

Tuesday's Tom Daschle news stepped all over President Obama's stimulus
sales campaign. Likewise, it kept me from writing about Robert Reich's
excellent Salon piece on the larger issues at stake in the stimulus
battle, but I want to take it up today.

Reich said something Democrats almost never say: The so-called
fundamentals of our economy didn't start weakening in 2007 or 2008 with
the housing and credit crisis; they haven't been strong for most
American workers since wages began stagnating in the 1970s.

I'm going to quote Reich in a major way in a minute. But I'm writing
because I'm concerned about how Obama is and isn't selling his crucial
stimulus/recovery bill. I'm wondering about what he'd say about it in an
FDR-style "fireside chat." On YouTube, or wherever. Even though I'm an
Obama admirer, and also, I'm paid to know these things, I'm not sure I
do know how he'd make the case for why this bill will solve our
economy's problems, and why it must pass. And soon, because new poll
numbers now show that public support for it is already dropping fast. A
Rasmussen poll says 43 percent oppose it, and 37 support it, an 8-point
slide in two weeks. Nate Silver thinks that poll overstates the bill's
troubles. "There is some evidence -- the trendline in the Rasmussen poll
-- that he stimulus has become less popular. There is no evidence, on
the other hand, that the stimulus has become unpopular; on the contrary,
the preponderance of polling evidence suggests it remains a course of
action that most of the public likes." Still, the Washington Post
reported today that Senate Democrats don't think they have the votes to
pass it right now.

Obama is the Democrats' Great Communicator, our Ronald Reagan. It's
fitting that his highest priority will be reversing the tax and spending
priorities Reagan enshrined as a new American compact almost 30 years
ago, and reviving the notion of government as an engine of capitalist
growth -- not merely the safety net provider, but the catalyst for
organizing our public resources around what makes the economy strong.
We've been arguing at the margins during these last two years of pain:
Government should regulate more, or less. Tax rates should be higher, or
lower. But there's a dangerous civic illiteracy in our country about
what the larger role of government in a modern economy is, or should be,
and I don't think Obama will ultimately prevail if he doesn't start to
take it on.

Obama is the most remarkable Democratic communicator of my lifetime, I
think, and even he's not rising to the task, yet. He needs to lay out
his priorities, clearly; he needs to simplify his pitch, yet he also
needs to add some depth to his and our understanding of how we got here.
This economic crisis is not just about bad mortgages and/or the housing
bubble bursting, and it won't be solved by reinflating that bubble, the
Republicans' latest dumb idea. These problems have been building since
at least the 1970s. Here's how Reich laid it out on Salon:

The bursting of the housing bubble caused the current crisis, but
the underlying problem began much earlier -- in the late 1970s, when
median U.S. incomes began to stall. Because wages got hit then by the
double-whammy of global competition and new technologies, the typical
American family was able to maintain its living standard only if women
went into the workforce in larger numbers, and later, only if everyone
worked longer hours.

When even these coping mechanisms were exhausted, families went into
debt -- a strategy that was viable as long as home values continued to
rise. But when the housing bubble burst, families were no longer able to
easily refinance and take out home-equity loans. The result: Americans
no longer have the money to keep consuming. When you consider that
consumers make up 70 percent of the economy, the magnitude of the
problem becomes apparent.

What happened to the money? According to researchers Thomas Piketty
and Emmanuel Saez, since the late 1970s, a greater and greater share of
national income has gone to people at the top of the earnings ladder. As
late as 1976, the richest 1 percent of the country took home about 9
percent of the total national income. By 2006, they were pocketing more
than 20 percent. But the rich don't spend as much of their income as the
middle class and the poor do -- after all, being rich means that you
already have most of what you need. That's why the concentration of
income at the top can lead to a big shortfall in overall demand and send
the economy into a tailspin. (It's not coincidental that 1928 was the
last time that the top 1 percent took home more than 20 percent of the
nation's income.)

Now, honestly, I'm not sure how President Obama makes this point,
roughly hourly, for the next four (and I hope eight) years. But this
point has to be made, as often as possible, by anyone with an audience.
We've had a deliberate shift of resources from middle- and working-class
Americans and the poor, to the very rich, supported by our tax codes,
twisted political values and the "winner-take-all" ethic that's
prevailed at the highest levels of business and government for the last
30 years. Now, unbelievably, Republicans are saying we need even more
tax cuts. (What part of tax-cutter George W. Bush's economic
catastrophe, and his 22 percent approval rating, do they not
understand?) They also back measures to reinflate the housing bubble
that let Americans ignore their stagnating wages, as long as they worked
more hours as a family and could also use their homes as an ATM. Their
plans to reinflate the housing bubble seem as delusional, frankly, as
their backing tax cuts, and even more irresponsible. Tax cuts won't
work, but reinflating the housing bubble might work -- to encourage more
consumption and less savings, and roll this problem a few more years
down the road.

Democrats know the Republicans are wrong. Little children know they're
wrong. Cats and dogs know they're wrong. But somehow this week,
unbelievably, Obama and the Democrats seem to be losing the spin war.
There are the worrying poll numbers. And there is the Washington Post
report that Senate Democrats don't have the votes to pass a stimulus
bill yet, at least not with the 60 votes that would rule out a
filibuster. In this economic crisis, with 2.6 million jobs lost last
year and thousands more lost in every news cycle, what does it take to
create the urgency and responsibility to get this done?

I'd like everyone in charge of selling the stimulus to take a deep
breath, and then, in an extended sound bite, articulate the long view (I
know, I ask a lot). Along with Reich, Jeff Madrick goes into all the
larger issues in greater detail in his excellent book "The Case for Big
Government," and winds up in the same place (even though, remarkably,
the book was written before the current economic collapse and attendant
debate over what the stimulus should do). I hope Obama and his team are
reading Madrick and Reich. Because they're really just talking common
sense: Public spending priorities need to catch up to 21st-century
economic life. The long and lamentable Republican revolution of 1980
through 2008 aimed, and partly succeeded, in sending us back to the 19th
century -- and we are all suffering for it. We will continue to suffer
unless Democrats grab the political momentum voters gave them in
November.

Of course, the 19th century wasn't all bad, but in our current political
environment, we've forgotten what was good: Eventually government
(thanks to political, religious and labor agitation) came to see its
role as providing K-12 education, building roads, canals, bridges and
railroads (after private sector efforts faltered), and the slow budding
of certain health and safety regulations. In the 20th century, that
public mandate expanded into Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment
insurance and other safety net programs, thanks to the New Deal and the
Great Society. Today, profound economic change likewise requires new
government initiatives, but they are many years overdue, for a lot of
depressing political and economic reasons. The years since the early
1970s have been hard for middle- and low-income workers. Real wages
became stagnant -- the average weekly earnings of non-supervisory
workers actually fell between 1973 and 2005. The late '60s and early
'70s also marked the exodus of manufacturing jobs in the central cities,
which William Julius Wilson and others persuasively argue played a huge
role in creating the so-called underclass in many once-vital
African-American neighborhoods.

Madrick lays out a few new-economy political priorities; you may have
more, add them in comments:

Why, when post-secondary education is essential in this economy, are
most families on their own when it comes to paying for college?
Secondary education is awesome, isn't it? Can you imagine this country
without it? But isn't it time to think beyond that? Why isn't K-16 or so
an American entitlement?

A chart published a year ago by Moody's Economy.com shows that the types
of measures in the Democrats' stimulus plan actually put money into the
economy, fast. For example, according to Economy.com's model, every
dollar lost to the Treasury from increased infrastructure spending would
add $1.59 to the gross domestic product in a year. Every dollar lost to
a cut in the corporate tax rate would add 30 cents to the GDP in a year.

And why, when most women work, is there so little support for childcare,
family leave and other family friendly social policies?

Also: Why, when the cost of health insurance is tacking thousands of
dollars onto the cost of every American-made car, and threatening to
capsize many small businesses, is there so little serious progress on
healthcare and insurance reform in our public realm? Where are the
capitalist visionaries of yesteryear, trying to shape public spending by
driving it toward what businesses need to thrive?

Oh, and climate change: If that continues, we're all screwed, college
grads and high school dropouts, moms, dads, auto execs, small-business
owners, capitalist pigs and visionaries alike. But we've gotten no real
movement on climate change these last eight years (though I'm grateful
to Obama for deferring to my GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at least a
little bit on this one). Again: why?

The Democrats' stimulus plan has funding to deal with all of those
enormous unmet needs (although probably not enough). The bigger question
is, why isn't the country clamoring for support for such
capitalism-bolstering programs, especially at this time of economic
crisis and political optimism ushered in by the election of Obama, which
was, paradoxically, motivated by enormous voter pessimism about that
same crisis?

The answer is not merely that American workers and voters and unions and
Democrats mysteriously stopped agitating for progressive change in the
1960s (although many did, and the weakness of unions is part of the
story, but it's as much an effect as a cause of these political and
economic sea-changes). The fact is, there was a massive organized
political campaign against the egalitarian and economy-growing reforms
of the 1930s and the 1960s, one that ran from Barry Goldwater to Ronald
Reagan to John McCain, a very well-run and well-funded and sadly
effective backlash. And it's one that nobody wants to talk about, in our
convivial, bipartisan, cable-news-dominated, partisan-blog-loving,
newspaper-shrinking, amnesia-promoting political and media-freakshow
entertainment economy.

But we have to.

It's clear from the stimulus debate that some conservatives never
stopped fighting the New Deal, as empty as their arguments were then and
now. Andrew Leonard is brilliant, in my opinion, but he's only one guy,
and he alone takes down multiple well-funded think tanks dedicated to
anti-New Deal idiocy. The stupid, it burns, but the stupid is
relentless.

Then there's the whole legacy of the Great Society. A lot of the
opposition to government spending suddenly, opportunistically became
(overtly or covertly) racial in the 1960s and '70s, as the social and
political and economic change inspired by the civil rights movement
intersected with new social programs, some of them awesome, a few of
them wasteful, all of them only partly effective. The bottom line for
Republicans became: The government is helping those other people with
your tax dollars, they're not helping you. And some Democrats agreed.

Now, many if not most of us need help from our own tax dollars, and the
Democrats seem ill-equipped to make the arguments to make that happen,
despite Obama's overwhelming win in November. This really makes no
political sense to me.

Here's how I think Obama should sell the stimulus. Long version here,
short version below.

First, he should make it unapologetically clear that we are putting
money in the hands of people who will spend it, fast, when no one else
is spending: Working-class and low-income people, the employed and the
recently unemployed. Food stamps, extended unemployment insurance, help
with health insurance, the earned income tax credit, payroll tax relief.
(Stunningly, Ronald Reagan lowered taxes on the rich but raised payroll
taxes, an unforgivably regressive wealth transfer.) All those measures
get money in the hands of people who can't afford to hoard it, and it
goes back into the economy immediately. Democrats think such spending is
justified by the principles of fairness and equity, but whatever your
political beliefs, you should know that these priorities mean that money
will be spent in the real world quickly, and that's what the economy
needs.

Almost as quickly, we are funding so-called shovel-ready infrastructure
programs, which will get money into the economy ASAP, funding jobs while
also doing the things American business and government needs to catch up
with the rest of the world. We can't afford more levies breaking in New
Orleans or bridges collapsing in Minneapolis -- or anywhere else.

We're also putting money into not-quite shovel-ready but crucial
programs, especially mass transit that links our suburbs and exurbs with
our central cities, and creates opportunity for everyone, and programs
that reduce climate change and move us to a future driven by green jobs
and industry.

Finally, we are belatedly making down payments on our 21st-century
economy that, sadly, nobody was wise enough to make in the last century.
Head Start and education funding, college programs, healthcare reform,
green job creation, energy efficiency and climate change spending: We
can't catch up with the rest of the world if we don't spend on those
things, belatedly, right now. It's not a matter of if, it's when, and I
believe the time is now. That's what you elected me to do. These
programs will stimulate the kind of recovery that will make sure our
children don't face the same kind of crisis in another generation.

Obama can no doubt improve on my language. He can probably improve the
taxonomy of spending. He may even have different priorities. The point
is, he has to lay them out.

He made a start today. Here's what he said when introducing limits on
executive compensation for firms getting TARP money:

That's why I feel such a sense of urgency about the Economic
Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that is before Congress today. With it,
we can save or create more than three million jobs, doing things that
will strengthen our country for generations to come. It is not merely a
prescription for short-term spending - it's a strategy for long-term
economic growth in areas like renewable energy, health care, and
education.

Now, in the past few days I've heard criticisms of this plan that
echo the very same failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis
-- the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we
can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high
cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to
thrive.

I reject that theory, and so did the American people when they went
to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. So I urge
members of Congress to act without delay. No plan is perfect, and we
should work to make it stronger. But let's not make the perfect the
enemy of the essential. Let's show people all over our country who are
looking for leadership in this difficult time that we are equal to the
task.

It's better, but it's not enough. He needs bigger and simpler themes:
Put money in the hands of those who need it most -- and will spend it
fastest. Create jobs and rebuild infrastructure so we see no more levees
fail, bridges collapse and school buildings crumble. Invest in new,
future-facing job-creating projects like new transit and green industry.
Finally, do what our brave ancestors did, and make government again the
engine of economic development, by providing the support 21st century
employers and workers require: from Head Start and early education
programs through college funding; new health insurance programs;
lifetime worker retraining, investments in broadband infrastructure and
green technologies.

It could be inspiring; it's certainly necessary. If Obama fights on big
themes of rights and responsibilities and how we get through this crisis
together, he wins. If he lets the debate remain on the level of "Why is
there contraception funding in the bill? How is furniture for the
Department of Homeland Security stimulative? We've just got to reinflate
the housing bubble!" he loses, and we lose. It shouldn't be this hard.

Here's how Madrick summed up the Reagan revolution. It's depressing: "A
life of family strain, inequality and insecurity has become accepted as
inevitable. It is even thought to be a strength of America. This was
Ronald Reagan's Trojan horse, disguised as optimism." But now it's
Morning in America, for the rest of us. Obama needs to take his sales
pitch to a new level. People want to believe he can make a difference,
but time's a wasting.


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