Sounds like Obama did a great job unloading on the Republicans today, and, quite predictably, the whiner’s chorus has commenced. This kind of thing just gave Paul Ryan the vapors:
“Our entire financial system was nearly destroyed. So we’ve tried this theory out. And you’d think that with the results of this experiment of trickledown economics, after the results became painfully clear, that the proponents of this theory would show some humility.” You’d think they’d change some of their ideas: open themselves up to ending the Bush tax cuts, or being willing to entertain to add new regulations. “Instead of moderating themselves even slightly…[House Republicans]…passed a plan so right wing it made the original Contract with America look like The New Deal.”
I read elsewhere that, for some reason, George W. Bush has been unheard from during the current Republican campaign. While the candidates had been lining up to kiss Jeb’s ring, there have been no pilgrimages to wherever W is hiding out these days. This is because, as the hyperbolic reaction to today’s speech attests, Republicans desperately want to pretend that the world began on January 20, 2009. For reasons that I can not even begin to fathom, Obama specifically, and the Democrats generally, pretty much played along with the pretense. There was no Bush Recession or Bush Bailout framing coming from the Democrats, though both events happened on his watch. There was no concerted effort on the part of Democrats to relentlessly remind the country that it was Bush and the Republicans that rammed through the policies that destroyed America. As they have done for the past thirty two years at least, the Democrats allowed the Republicans to control the national conversation. It is actually a testament to the American people that despite the Republican’s near monopoly on that conversation, most Americans still recognize that it was Bush and the Republicans, and not Obama, that caused the depression in which we are still mired.
We can only hope that it’s not to late for Obama to grab hold of the narrative. He’s an amazing speaker, so it’s entirely possible that he can make people forget his own sins-detailed here in the past- and believe that maybe the second time around he’ll realize that you can’t reason with these people. There is room for debate on the question, but I firmly believe his argument would be easier to make if he’d been making it all along.
But, as I’ve said before, at least from a political point of view, Obama is the luckiest guy in the world. The Republicans seem eager to help, as they prepare to offer a plutocrat as their standard bearer. There’s nothing an insecure people want more, they seem to think, than a guy who talks about how much he likes to fire people and tells funny stories about how his dad laid people off.
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