It‘s time to stop holding workers laid off in this recession hostage to Washington politics. It‘s time to do what‘s right not for the next election but for the middle class. We‘ve got to stop blocking emergency relief for Americans who are out of work. We‘ve got to extend unemployment insurance. We need to pass those tax cuts for small businesses and lending for small businesses. Times are hard right now. We are moving in the right direction. I know it‘s getting close to an election, but there are times when you put elections aside. This is one of those times.
It’s interesting how politicians have key phrases that their speech writers use over and over. Bush had them but, happily, my mind has discarded them so I can’t quote them at the moment. Obama has “hostage.” People were being “held hostage by health insurance companies” during the “health care reform” debate. Then they were being “held hostage by the financial industry” during the “financial reform” debate. Now, “It‘s time to stop holding workers laid off in this recession hostage to Washington politics.”
What happens for me, when I hear the same phrase in multiple settings, is that I no longer feel that the man is talking to me, I no longer feel that his words have any personal meaning to him or to me; he is just giving a speech that someone else wrote for him to read.
After two years of campaigning and almost two years in office ranting against the Republicans for all of their taxcutting, the first major bill Obama urged was a stimulus bill that was 40% tax cuts, he has stumped about how his party has “cut taxes for 90% of Americans,” and now he is urging that, “We need to pass those tax cuts for small businesses,” which is right out of the Republican playbook.
He’s adding to that, “…lending for small business,” apparently unaware that there are no small businesses in this country that want to borrow any money. They are not using the capacity they have, and they have no interest whatever in expanding in a market that they do not feel warrants that expansion. How he thinks that putting pressure on banks to lend money is going to do anything is beyond me, when the mood of the country is contraction rather than expansion of debt.
Finally, he’s certainly not winning many friends in Congress with, “I know it‘s getting close to an election, but there are times when you put elections aside. This is one of those times.” That’s easy for him to say when he is not up for reelection, and it sounds hollow to me.
Many writers and pundits are thrilled that Obama has finally “gone on the attack” against the Republican Party; that he is making the upcoming election a “choice” between the two parties. Obama is no longer talking much about what Democrats have done so much as he's just warning us about what the Republicans will do if we elect them.
But that is what the party out of power has traditionally done, and this is the first time in more than forty years of following politics that I have seen the party in power make the central theme of an election “we’re not them” rather than the policies that they have implemented while in office.
Democrats have passed a stimulus bill, “health care reform,” and “financial reform” in this term, but all have been so badly flawed and so nasty in the process of passage that they cannot run for reelection on them.
And so in November we will have two choices at the poll, both of whom will be offering as a reason to vote for them, “We’re not the other guy.”
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