Visual source: Newseum
NY Times:
1940 campaign against FDR
Republicans Call Obama’s Tax Plan ‘Class Warfare’
The response came after a report that the president will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year.
"Millionaires for the GOP."
EJ Dionne on Democratic angst:
Obama and his party are grappling with the “tragedy of the commons” in a classic form. Obama, who has been so happy to stay distant and above the concerns of his Democratic allies, cannot afford to lose them now. Democrats in Congress have a long list of reasons for being resentful. The special elections will aggravate their fears of embracing the president too closely.
Yet if Obama’s presidency is weakened further, the resulting damage will afflict Democrats as a whole. However justified their past grievances might be, they have a powerful collective interest in seeing the fighting Obama get his new act off the ground.
Worth reading in total.
Steve Benen:
This may seem counter-intuitive — if people like the parts, they should like the whole — but it makes a lot of sense. Indeed, we saw the exact same thing during the fight over health care reform when Americans said they didn’t like the Affordable Care Act, but strongly supported all of the ideas in the proposal. The problem is one of political perceptions — the president is struggling, so when folks are asked about his plan, the question becomes a referendum on him. But when asked about specific ideas, it turns out most Americans agree with Obama and his plan. (Likewise, during health care, folks were misled by attack ads and lousy media coverage, and came to think poorly of the proposal, but they actually liked what’s in the plan.)
Taken together, Republicans aren’t just unpopular as a party, but they also stand strongly against with what the American mainstream wants. Some of the most popular ideas to give the economy a boost are also some of the ideas Republicans refuse to even consider.
Indeed, we now have four recent polls — NYT, CNN, National Journal, and NBC — that have all found roughly the same dynamic: “[D]espite all the disapproval and pessimism, Americans approve of the actual fiscal policies Obama is proposing.”
Greg Sargent:
What we’re seeing here, again, is more evidence that Republicans benefit from blocking policies Americans support. As long as the economy remains abysmal, the public is likely to strongly disapprove of Obama’s overall performance, even if Republicans are the ones blocking job-creation ideas the public itself thinks will reduce unemployment.
Yes, approval of the GOP is even lower than that of Obama. But let’s face it — he runs the place. If the economy doesn’t turn around, he’s likely to pay the highest political price, no matter who is to blame for government’s failure to act amid persistently high unemployment.
Is there a way out of this trap? Perhaps. As Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza noted the other day, the fact that the public still gives Obama’s individual policies high marks suggests that despite all the overall disapproval of Obama on the economy and jobs, the public is still prepared to hear him out on the topic. Even if things look very bleak right now, there’s still an opportunity for him win this battle, by getting some actual policies passed — they are popular, after all — or by driving home to the public who’s responsible for goverment paralysis in the face of the crisis.
Paul Krugman:
Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient’s blood they could purge the evil “humors” that were thought to cause disease. In reality, of course, all their bloodletting did was make the patient weaker, and more likely to succumb.
Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects.
The trouble with GOP prescriptions isn't that they are not what partisan Democrats want... it's that they are just flat out wrong.
