Allow me to shout "Huzzah!" for this piece by riverdaughter. She slams Glenn Greenwald and other Obots who rationalize away their messiah's penchant for "triangulation" -- that is, for co-opting Republican positions.
Lefties now accuse Bill Clinton of being a master triangulator. You betcha. He had to be. He was president during a very conservative period. Newt and Rush and all of their confreres had convinced most of the nation that Clinton was actually a bolshie, and their fulminations led many fanatical rightists to train for an armed takeover. That's what the militia movement was all about.
Things are different now that the neocon experiment has run its course -- a course which led over a cliff and into a pool of septic waste. Obi has a rare chance to change the game. But he won't.
Look at his economics team: Larry Summers (a libertarian who thinks unions cause unemployment), Timothy Geithner (New York Federal Reserve President), Austan Goolsbee (Chicago schooler), Paul Volcker (author of the Reagan recession). Yeesh. These are the guys entrusted with righting our current woes.
Unlike Clinton, Obama could have chosen anyone. Instead, he went for a "dream team" that would have made Milton Friedman smile.The times demand a Roosevelt; instead, we have a Reagan -- yet another Reagan.
5 comments:
WJC spent his whole time in office playing defense against an ascendant and agressive GOP that had an advantage in money, media and organization.
He did a great job - if his administration was a football team it would rank with the Steel Curtain, the 1986 Bears or the 2000 Ravens.
But now the Democrats should be on offense and their strategy is "kneel-down three times then punt."
I guess they don't want to be "offensive"
Reagan, or at least his team, took a pragmatic approach, especially on economics.
Not unlike the case of FDR's economic transformation from trying to out-Hoover Hoover in balancing the budget, to an ad hoc improvised bit of Keynesianism.
After Reagan got his personal income tax rate graduated, phased-in reductions passed, and a very large corporate tax cut passed, the economy tanked, and the market tanked. When Stockman revealed economic projections of $100 billion dollar deficits 'as far as the eye can see,' Reagan's inside circle troika member James A. Baker III exclaimed, 'holy shit, you mean it really IS voodoo economics!?'
In short order, the very next year, the Reagan WH unusually allowed a tax bill to originate in the GOP-controlled Senate instead of the Democratic Party-controlled House, authored by Senate Finance Chair Bob Dole, called DEFRA, the Deficit Reduction Act. It substantially repealed ALL of the corporate tax breaks just put into law, in order to partially staunch the flow of red ink. Reagan signed that bill, which had been prompted by the wiser heads of his troika together with traditional fiscal conservatives in the GOP, Dole and others.
Similarly, Reagan signed into law very large tax HIKES each and every year following the first year's tax cutting spree. First up to break the ice was his Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis' move to hike the federal excise tax on gasoline, selling Reagan on it as a 'user fee,' not a real tax. Once Reagan got started down the 'raise taxes' road, he never went back to his old orthodoxy, except in his rhetoric.
Reagan also reversed many long-held policies and opinions in other areas, most notably in coming around to support arms control deals, which he'd previously condemned as harmful to US security, and worthless considering our godless lying counter-party.
Perhaps these were not Reagan's own conversions, so much as the pragmatism of those he had entrusted with policy making (Baker, Schultz at State, etc.). But he came to strongly support these changes, which were 180 degrees from his prior positions, even as much of an ideologue as he was.
If this is the model BHO will use, it might not work out so badly. After all, he doesn't even start out as much of an ideologue, having instead an apparent pragmatic streak.
Another example from history has the NY Times finding 'the stench of a failed presidency' in Clinton some weeks before he'd even taken office. That was premature at best, wholly wrong at the end of the day, and verifies the old Yogi Berra maxim about prognosticating.
XIslander
Excellent summary. And the explanation of Obama being financed and PR-ed by the GOP over Hillary.
XIslander:
Any pragmatic streak that Obama has seems to me to be far outstripped - or "outstriped" as it were - by his obvious I'll-go-along-with-whomever-gives-me-the-most-money streak, hence his economic team being made up of people whose philosophies and actions have in the past caused the economy to tank for everyone but the wealthy.
Sergei Rostov
Sergei:
Sure, but BHO's economic team IS THE FORMER CLINTON TEAM.
Clinton is in rather good odor around here with Joe, so how does BHO's hiring on HIS team show what a loser BHO is?
XIslander
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