Saturday, January 23, 2010

Obama's Faux Populism


Obama's Cross of Arugulaby
Tom Bevan, Real Clear Politics

So today we got a glimpse of the new, populist Obama. He feels our pain. He will fight for us until his very last breath (even if he's fighting to pass policies the public doesn't like, apparently).

He is going to get every dime of our money back from those evil banks on Wall Street (even though most have already paid back what they owe.) The White House seems to think a pivot to populism will help the President politically. But it probably won't. Here's why:
Obama isn't a "man of the people."


Never has been. That isn't the image he ran on during the campaign, and it isn't why people voted for him. Even more to the point, it certainly wasn't how he governed during his first year in office. Obama ran as a thoughtful, cool-headed, competent intellectual who was going to bring both parties together to develop and implement solutions to America's most serious problems.

But - and here's the rub - after a year of bailing out Wall Street and car makers, passing a stimulus that didn't produce any tangible results for Main Street (i.e. jobs), and focusing most of his energy in pushing a partisan health care bill through Congress using backroom deals with industries and individual Democratic Senators, huge swaths of the country have lost confidence in Obama.

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