Brooklynbadboy wrote an excellent front-page piece about the "Winning The Future" strategy being employed by the White House to appeal to independent and swing voters for the 2012 campaign:
The president's budget slogan reflects a White House that is in full reelect mode, and the budget is one as well. But strictly on the merits of sloaganeering, it seems a rather hollow way to avoid talking about the twin proverbial 800-lb. silverbacks in the political room: the crisis in unemployment/underemployment and the housing crisis. When you read through the budget, it is a clear the numbers were designed around the slogan, and not around the gorillas. Certainly, this reflects the current state of affairs: With Republicans in control of the House, there is no chance this president will be given any lattitude to tackle the current crises aggressively and effectively. So, in what basically amounts to a throwing up of the hands, the president has designed a political strategy whose goal is to convince the American people to...ahem...hope.
One day, we will all be super-educated and therefore able to outwit everyone else in some sort of global game. One day, we will build stuff again, like bridges and tunnels. One day, we will become a great manufacturing power again. But all of the things that allowed us to do these things in the past, like strong unions, industrial policy, inexpensive education, heavy regulation, and taxation that redistributed wealth downward will not be found in this budget because those things aren't on the table in any branch of government. What is on the table is a future, a future where everything will work out. We will win! Hooray for optimism!
Optimism currently is in short supply these days with the right-wing attacks on our middle class, the unions, our teachers, public servants, and on women and children's health. It may be nice to talk about "winning the future" but in the present, we are witnessing the unprecedented decimation of our middle class, with the shock doctrine in full effect with nary a response from our elected officials in Washington, D.C.
I also wrote earlier about the vacuity of the "Winning The Future" approach by the White House, noting that it was based on several faulty assumptions about our present jobs crisis:
Now what we see here is the belief in Washington D.C., that the jobs problem stems from not having a smarter workforce ready to "out-innovate" out of this present situation.
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Many of those currently laid off are in their late forties and fifties. Age discrimination is rampant in employment, and how will more "education" of these workers make them more attractive to those corporations? These corporations don't want to deal with the health problem of these workers and continuing their salaries when they can get a younger person in for less the salary. Given that the unemployment rate is rather high, and is not slated to come down for a few more years, it seems odd that the focus isn't put on these corporations to hire people, but on the workforce instead to make corporations "hire" them.
Also, along with free trade, the race to the bottom scenario keeps being employed with more jobs going overseas. We all remember how NAFTA turned out. It was heralded as bringing more jobs to America by President Clinton, and the inverse happened with a dessication of the manufacturing sector and losses in union jobs.
For a deeper look on how "more education" really isn't the answer to the jobs problem, please feel free to read The Atlantic's Daniel Indiviglio on the paper from the Economic Policy Institute which presents a compelling argument on this issue.
Instead of putting the onus on the workers to solve the jobs problem by "educating" themselves more or "innovating" more, we need to correctly put the focus on corporations and on the economy itself.
The heavy focus on "Winning The Future" tells us that the present can't be saved, and that there is no "hope" in immediately addressing the crisis we face at the local, state, and national level since the political will is lacking in D.C. to put forth solutions to solve our present crisis. It sends us the message that the housing crisis won't be fixed, the bad actors on Wall Street won't be punished, that the rule of law won't be restored, that the jobs crisis is unsolvable, and that those in Washington, D.C., are completely out of touch with what we are facing as Americans. Instead of addressing the problems in the present by "winning the present," they are looking to the future instead.
That is a clear abdication of moral and political leadership. With that said, the middle class is waking up to the assault on their way of life, and thousands and thousands of Americans are fighting back at the state level by organizing together as masses at state capitols against Republicans and corporations. They know they can't rely on those in Washington, D.C., anymore, and that in order to win this class war which Washington, D.C., is ignorant of, they have to pull together to win.
Regular Americans are winning the present, even though as the day-to-day battles are lost, but as one famous American, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "Tthe arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It matters in taking the mantle of moral leadership up, and in encouraging your friends, family, and your local politicians to do so as well. To win the future, we need to start winning the present today, and that should be our focus going forward if we are to have any hope of keeping our middle class intact.