Almost three months now i have been travelling through the highly segregated united states, segregated by class and by colour, and now i read a piece in a white man's paper written by a black columnist, suggesting that a black president would be allowed by the white rich 1 percent of the population possessing 40 percent of the wealth of the nation to cut their profits. Obama has been chosen as a candidate by this 1 percent to sell a message of hope, not to endanger the interests of the rich who posses also the mainstream media. This Bob herbert is either an idiot or a crook.
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Paying the Price
By BOB HERBERT
Published: September 10, 2010
Like homeowners in the path of an approaching wildfire, Democrats are scrambling to salvage what they can from an anticipated disaster in the coming elections.
Bob Herbert
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Pundits are predicting the loss of the House and maybe even the Senate to the Republicans, and polls are showing a level of disenchantment among voters that is bordering on despair. Nearly two-thirds of respondents to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll said they believe the country is in a state of decline.
A full two-thirds said they are no longer confident “that life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.”
People feel that the country is going to hell, that the system itself has broken down, and President Obama and the Democrats have been unable to assuage that awful feeling. The White House and Democratic Congressional leaders can point to a long string of legislative accomplishments — passage of a health insurance overhaul, financial reform, a stimulus package that may have been misshapen and too small but nevertheless helped stave off a worse economic disaster, and so on.
But voters do not feel that the administration and Congress have delivered the fundamental change they were seeking when they swept President Obama and huge Democratic majorities into office nearly two years ago. Forget about the crazies in the Tea Party for the moment. Forget about the ugly Republican obstructionism that is based on the idea that the failure not just of President Obama but of American society itself is the G.O.P.’s quickest ticket back to power.
Forget about that for a moment. The Democrats are in deep, deep trouble because they have not effectively addressed the overwhelming concern of working men and women: an economy that is too weak to provide the jobs they need to support themselves and their families. And that failure is rooted in the Democrats’ continued fascination with the self-serving conservative belief that the way to help ordinary people is to shower money on the rich and wait for the blessings to trickle down to the great unwashed below.
It was a bogus concept when George H.W. Bush denounced it as “voodoo economics” in 1980, and it remains bogus today, no matter how hard the Democrats try to dress it up in a donkey costume.
A survey of American workers by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University found that more than 70 percent had either lost a job or had a relative or close friend who had lost a job. Nearly two of three expect the U.S. to still be in recession next year, and nearly one in five are worried that a depression may be coming.
This economy and the rampant anxiety it has caused would be toxic stuff for whatever party was in power.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, commenting on the president’s recent $50 billion transportation infrastructure proposal, said: “This is about long-term economic growth. This isn’t about the next 60 days or the next 90 days. This is about how do we get our economy fully back on track, how do we get the millions that want to work back to work, and how do we repair the economic damage that’s been going on not just over the past two years but over the past 10 years.”
Well, that’s the drum the Democrats should have been pounding in the earliest days of the Obama administration, and they should have backed it up with a dramatic rebuild America infrastructure campaign and every other job-creation measure they could think of, including public works projects for the young and the poor and the hard-core unemployed.
With the nation losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month in early-2009, the president and his allies in Congress could have rallied the citizenry to participate in the difficult work of nation-building here at home. He could have called on everyone to share in the sacrifices that needed to be made, and he could have demanded much more from the financial and corporate elites who were being bailed out with the people’s money.
The example had already been set by Franklin Roosevelt, who declared in his first Inaugural Address that “our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” And that task, he said, should be treated “as we would treat the emergency of a war.”
For Mr. Obama and the Democrats, that would have meant that health insurance reform, however noble, would have had to wait, and the war in Afghanistan would have had to de-escalate.
That didn’t happen. The Democrats are facing an election debacle because they did not respond adequately to their constituents’ most dire needs. The thing that is really weird is that a strengthened G.O.P. will undoubtedly make matters so much worse.
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