PPI President Will Marshall has an opinion piece
in The Hill today. Check it out here:
President Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the rich has liberals brimming with excitement. Finally, a Democrat who fights back against the plutocracy!
Given the steady erosion of his personal approval rating this year, it’s little wonder that Obama’s tax initiative is having a tonic effect on his demoralized base. Substantively, it’s a frontal assault on the GOP’s anti-tax fundamentalism, which unquestionably has become the chief obstacle to solving the nation’s fiscal crisis.
Such merits aside, however, Obama’s gambit is distressingly tactical. While his new deficit-reduction plan advances boldly on the revenue front, it retreats on entitlement reforms the president has previously endorsed. It thus falls short of the “grand bargain” every serious observer knows will have to be struck to control the debt.
What’s more, the populist mantle sits on Obama like an ill-fitting suit — it just doesn’t jibe with his essentially rational and equable persona.
Unlike the Washington commentariat, the public isn’t all that interested in Obama’s repositioning(s) along the political spectrum. Against monolithic GOP opposition, it doesn’t matter whether Obama shifts to the center or feints to the left. What Americans want is the man a solid majority of them voted for — a leader who can rise above today’s polarization and rally the country behind a convincing vision for solving the nation’s structural problems and recapturing America’s economic mojo.
Read the rest of it by clicking here.
Photo credit: Justin Sloan
