(Cross-posted on my blog, wantsomewood.blogspot.com)
The current conventional media wisdom is that President Obama and the Democrats are losing the support of independents, because most independents are worried about high government spending and the deficit. I have a really radical reaction: could independents, or at least the independents who believe what the media pundits say they believe, be wrong?
Could it be that the worst thing we could do as we barely start recovering from the most severe recession in decades is to worry about the deficit? Could it be that high unemployment, and the resulting low demand, are more important? Could it be that the government should be spending more money, not less, in order to stimulate the economy and provide the demand that individual consumers can’t (and doing things that need to be done while we’re at it, like fixing our broken infrastructure)?
Because of the obsession with bipartisanship that certain media outlets have, independents are sometimes held up as extra-wise voters, certainly smarter than those dumb partisans. I disagree; I think that independents, whatever their virtues, are as human as the rest of us, and the ones that believe that the deficit is the number-one problem right now could be as wrong on that subject as the conservatives with whom they are agreeing.
And while we’re on the subject of deficits, where was all this worry about them when George W. Bush was lowering taxes on the rich, making giveaways to drug companies, and starting two wars, at least one of which we now know to be totally unnecessary?
(By the way, Robert Reich said the same thing, and said it better, as he usually does.)