Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Obama: Devoid of Republican Substance

David Brooks often suggests that Obama's government is defensive, and that neither the Republicans not Obama have had substantive plans for changing things for the better.  Consider today's article, in which he offers Obama his skills as a speech writer:

Obama has been reactive. He has been defined by the various negotiating positions he has taken in his confrontations with Congress. He’s used a more partisan political style to mask his small-bore policy substance. It’s not clear what he is passionate to do if he is elected for another four years.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/opinion/obamas-elevator-speech.html?hp

Small-bore policy substance?  Mr Brooks obviously hasn't read the president's jobs program, not even taken up by the Republican-controlled House.  Nor Obama's budgets, dismissed a priori.  Nor Obama's negotiations with the Republicans over the budget, in which they refused to consider the slightest bit more spending or a penny of tax increase, holding simultaneously and irrationally that the deficit and high taxes are both problems needing to be addressed urgently and forgetting unemployment.  Nor Republican intimidation of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Takes two.  If there's only one at the table, that one makes concession after concession and meets only obduracy, that isn't symmetry.  Add on the constant drumbeat of doubt as to Obama's birth, religion, association with dangerous radicals, apologies for America, attacks on religion and other nonsense, and it's even worse.  Perhaps Mr Brooks should reconsider...

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