Put down the cup and step away from the Kool-Aid!

Just Say NO! to Kool-aid

Salon editor Joan Walsh:

 Obama is the Democrats’ Great Communicator, our Ronald Reagan. It’s fitting that his highest priority will be reversing the tax and spending priorities Reagan enshrined as a new American compact almost 30 years ago, and reviving the notion of government as an engine of capitalist growth — not merely the safety net provider, but the catalyst for organizing our public resources around what makes the economy strong. We’ve been arguing at the margins during these last two years of pain: Government should regulate more, or less. Tax rates should be higher, or lower. But there’s a dangerous civic illiteracy in our country about what the larger role of government in a modern economy is, or should be, and I don’t think Obama will ultimately prevail if he doesn’t start to take it on.

Obama is the most remarkable Democratic communicator of my lifetime, I think, and even he’s not rising to the task, yet. He needs to lay out his priorities, clearly; he needs to simplify his pitch, yet he also needs to add some depth to his and our understanding of how we got here.

This is the same Ronald Reagan that Obama praised, saying:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.  He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.  I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.  I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

Ronald Reagan was the slick salesman of bad policy.  He gave great speeches that other people wrote for him.  Reagan hatched the chickens that are now coming home to roost, and Joan Walsh wants Obama to be more like him.

In a moment of lucidity Walsh closes with this:

Here’s how Madrick summed up the Reagan revolution. It’s depressing: “A life of family strain, inequality and insecurity has become accepted as inevitable. It is even thought to be a strength of America. This was Ronald Reagan’s Trojan horse, disguised as optimism.” But now it’s Morning in America, for the rest of us. Obama needs to take his sales pitch to a new level. People want to believe he can make a difference, but time’s a wasting.

Joan Walsh helped sell Obama to the American  people with hagiographic coverage.  What did Obama have to offer besides stirring oratory?  Not much.  What evidence do we have that Obama wants to reverse Reagan’s tax and spending priorities?  Even less.

It’s morning in America alright, so wake up and smell the coffee, Joan.  Thanks to you we’ve all got a big Kool-aid hangover to deal with.

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