Not-so-revolutionary people like Anthony Weiner have convincingly argued that Obama could have barnstormed around the country, challenging Republicans who were willing to hold the vast majority of Americans hostage to tax-cuts for the wealthy. The point is that even if Obama was "really" for limiting the tax cuts, he was unwilling to mobilize masses of people around a more egalitarian program. And that's because, overall, he holds to pro-corporate policies that would be undermined by mass mobilization.
Incidentally, I signed the open letter about Obama, but it isn't clear to me who the organizers of the letter were, since the web site makes it clear that people who signed the letter were not necessarily in agreement with everything on the site. Can anyone shed light on this?
--Joanne
At 02:26 PM 12/13/2010 -0500, you wrote:
>On Dec 13, 2010, at 2:20 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > I don't, of course, KNOW. But it seems a simpler hypothesis than complex
> > analyses of his inner thoughts. Wojtek mentioned a simple way in which he
> > could have acted to let them expire. Are there any grounds for assuming
> that
> > he and/or his staff were too simple-minded or two frightened (of what?) to
> > follow that simple path. Instead he went through a complex procedure that
> > seems to have guaranteed their extension.
> >
> > No complex reasoning, it seems to me, is needed to conclude that he got
> what
> > he wanted.
> >
> > For two years Marxists, left-liberals, and plain-vanilla liberals have
> > indulged in complex reasonings to demonstrate that appearances to the
> > contrary Obama was ignoring all sorts of ways to accomplish what they
> > posited he must "really" have wanted. How is it that his critics are so
> much
> > more politically sophisticated than Obama and his staff are.
>
>I agree with the last, but on the first, it's quite possible Obama really
>wanted the upper bracket cuts to go and keep those for the rest - for both
>reasons of politics and economic stimulus. But the only way he could get
>that was by giving the GOP what it wanted on the upper brackets. I don't
>know which it is, but my explanation is hardly impossible.
>
>Doug
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