After feeding the baby and putting him down for his nap, my husband turned on
Meet The Press, a show that always makes my blood pressure want to skyrocket.
These Beltway D.C. insiders, with their well-coiffed hair and expensive suits that cost the equivalent of an average American family's entire monthly grocery budget, talked about how important it was for President Obama to do entitlement reform and to agree to the Keystone Pipeline deal.
One person whose name escapes me, nodded sagely and said that it was great that President Obama was triangulating against the left and against his base on entitlement reform. They said that the Obama White House was taking a page out of the whole Clinton triangulation deal with the big fiscal bargain and meeting with Republicans to get it passed.
I kept thinking, "But it's not the left that opposes the cuts to Social Security and Medicare. A majority of all Americans oppose these cuts, and they're not on the left. Why are they framing this as solely an issue for those on the left?" That's how misleading these D.C. insiders are because they know that many polls have shown a major opposition to the President's planned social safety net cuts. It benefits them and the White House to paint this as solely a left issue.
That's where the argument needs to be changed. The case needs to be made that it's a majority of Americans, both left, right, and the middle, that do not support the President on his austerity agenda for those vulnerable to his social safety net cuts. All organizations fighting these cuts need to make this as a major argument so that way the White House and those supporting the White House have no room to maneuver, and they can't paint this as a Clinton triangulation strategy against the left.
It's one of the few successful ways that I can see in fighting the White House and their neoliberal supporters against their austerity agenda for the elderly, the disabled, veterans, and those who are reliant upon Social Security and Medicare. After all, it's rather ridiculous to keep asking the weakest of us to keep on sacrificing while the wealthy keeps getting protected on Wall Street, in mortgage deals between the DOJ and major banks, and oil companies get a major assist in covering up their oil spills.
