In his online column today, entitled "Our leaders have squandered our wealth" today, Lou Dobbs actually makes great sense. Perhaps even more amazingly, discussion (or even the scantest mention) of immigration is totally absent from Dobbs' column today, as is any direct or even oblique mention of any particular presidential candidate. This is a column Paul Krugman could have written in the days before some suspected he was taking sides in the democratic presidential race.
Dobbs' theme is summarized in these key sentences:
"All Americans will soon have to face a bitter and now obvious truth: Our national, political and economic leaders have squandered this nation's wealth, and the price of this profligacy is enormous, and the bill has just come due for all of us."
"...let's be honest and straightforward, as I hope our president and the candidates for president will be: This stimulus will not prevent a recession. It may ease the pain for millions of Americans, but a recession we will have. The question is how deep, how prolonged and how painful will it be. Unfortunately, we're about to find out how committed and capable our national leaders are at mitigating that pain and producing realistic policy decisions for this nation that now stands at the brink."
For once, Dobbs has it nailed straight-on, written in a way that I would have more expected from one of the more serious, substantive diaries from one of our Kos regulars who could peel themselves away from writing about the presidential race or health-care topics, than from a talking head in the regular media.
Which of our Democratic presidential candidates is most likely/capable of telling it to the American public straight - that our economy's fundamentals are in serious trouble for the combined profligacy of the past thirty, and especially seven years?