[lbo-talk] “It provokes screams from the left”

[// ravi]

On Jul 27, 2011, at 10:46 PM, SA wrote:
> On 7/27/2011 10:31 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
>>> The question was why Obama thinks it won't hurt his reelection, not why he wants to do it in the first place.
>> Because he's trying to position himself as the "reasonable" alternative to a gang of loons. And, like they say in the movies, it might just work.
> 
> Right, that's Klein's explanation. And as the post said, maybe it will work. But the subtitle of the post was "a puzzle in the study of American politics." There's a reason for that: the claim you're making is that the voters might actually reward a politician for openly attacking their most important material interests in a way that they will notice and strongly object to because it will demonstrate the politician's "reasonableness." You try to play this off as if it's so obvious that questioning it is Byzantine speculation. I'm saying it's a puzzle.
> 

The way you formulate it, it sounds like a puzzle. But I think that’s not the right formulation. Obama (and I am sure the GOP) are guaranteeing current seniors no cuts in SS/Medicare. That takes care of that. The upcoming retirees are likely a bunch that has resigned, having been told many times over that SS/Medicare are unsustainable at current levels, large deficits are projected, on and on. They likely consider some sort of squeeze inevitable. The younger crowd has no hope at all. The Tea Party, baying for spending cuts (by which they means welfare, not the military) is comprised of these very voters.

I don’t think Obama is trying to position himself as the sane alternative. He and his handlers must be smart enough to know that there is no limit to the lunacy on the right (shortly after 9/11 I was involved in a discussion over email with a colleague and his friends: my colleague had forwarded a message with a lot of bogus data about how the US helped the world for years but after 9/11 no country expressed any sympathy for the US. When I pointed out that the facts do not substantiate these claims, one of the friends Cc’ed on the message called me a “faggot” and then went on to describe the filth that was India, etc. Others joined in. At which point, my colleague’s wife and a moderate person among the friends stepped in with a “let’s all calm down”. To them, my challenging the sentiment with facts was in need of as much “calming down” as the homophobia and invective). I don’t think Obama is positioning himself at all. His *is* mostly a polished up (“statesmanly”) version of moderate conventional wisdom/reasoning.

	—ravi