Over at Open Left, diarist Frankly0 appears to have uncovered political dynamite. S/he makes a strong circumstantial case that President Obama himself was one of "4 senior Adminstration officials" who visited David Brooks at the beginning of this month after he had written an article harshly critical of Obama's budget.
If Frankly0 is correct, then the agenda David Brooks relayed in his next column has to be regarded as coming from Obama himself. And that economic agenda is, I submit, explosive.
Below the fold I'll set for the evidence and the explosive allegations about what the Administration's ultimate agenda entails.
H/t to FranklyO who says, "A rather remarkable, and accidental tidbit [is] found in the Newsweek Krugman article:"
...in February, after Krugman's fellow Times op-ed columnist David Brooks wrote a critical column accusing Obama of overreaching, Brooks, a moderate Republican, was cajoled by three different aides and by the president himself, who just happened to drop by.
Now I have to believe that the February date mentioned here is not correct. Almost certainly, the "critical column" that is being referred to is this one, which came out Mar 3.
This is partly because it was by far the most critical that Brooks had written about Obama to that date, and certainly is accurately described as complaining about Obama overreaching in his budget. But it is also, almost certainly, the column intended because Brooks very next column, here, is devoted to the pushback Brooks received from the Obama administration over his previous column -- pushback, according to Brooks, from "four senior members of the [Obama] administration".
Could it possibly be a coincidence that there were four senior members described in that column, and that the Newsweek article mentions three senior members and Obama himself? Not, I think, in the actual universe.
....
Obama's being among these four officials ... is remarkable because it makes it nigh impossible to assert that the Center-Right point of view ascribed to Obama in that column could be a serious misrepresentation of Obama's true views.
I think Frankly0 makes a persuasive case that Obama himself visited Brooks. If so, that makes Brooks' column relaying those remarks all the more explosive:
On Tuesday, I wrote that the Obama budget is a liberal, big government document that should make moderates nervous.... Within a day, I had conversations with four senior members of the administration and in the interest of fairness, I thought I’d share their arguments with you today.
In the first place, they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy that have been thrown out of whack. They’re not engaged in an ideological project to overturn the Reagan Revolution....
Second, ...
The White House has produced a chart showing nondefense discretionary spending as a share of G.D.P. That’s spending for education, welfare and all the stuff that Democrats love. .... The White House claims that it is going to reduce this spending to 3.1 percent by 2019, lower than at any time in any recent Republican administration. I was invited to hang this chart on my wall and judge them by how well they meet these targets. (I have.)
Third, they say, ... [t]he Medicare reform represents a big cut in entitlement spending. It amounts to means-testing the system. It introduces more competition and cuts corporate welfare. These are all Republican ideas.
....
Fourth, the White House claims the budget will not produce a sea of red ink.....
He is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending. The White House folks didn’t say this, but I got the impression they’d be willing to raise taxes on the bottom 95 percent of earners as part of an overall package.
Fifth, the Obama folks feel they spend as much time resisting liberal ideas as enacting them....
As I have said above, I believe that Frankly0 makes an excellent circumstantial caee that the representations above can be attributed directly to President Obama himself.
I have been extremely worried since over a year ago that Obama drank from the "Social Security crisis" kool-aid, and the above makes me even more worried.
Beyond that, far from enacting a new progressive economic agenda, the above quotes validate Stirling Newberry's withering criticism of Obama as representing "Reaganism lite."