He’s Just Not That Into You, Dave

Dave Sirota discovers he was just a booty call:

I forgot how weirdly rigid the social hierarchies are at official political events, but I was reminded when, as a member of the press, I was corralled into a steel cage (see right) and cordoned off from the audience, as if under quarantine. Oh, and I was also set apart from the “traveling press” – the national reporters that travel on Air Force One. They got the good seats, and the local media was put in the back (no sour grapes, I swear – I’m just happy to have gotten in).

That last sentence is full of sad.  Dave must still be longing for a repeat of the day they spent together because he’s still infatuated:

Is President Obama rediscovering the economically populist voice that fueled his campaign? After spending a week traveling to locales outside the eliteosphere in Washington, D.C., it seems like he certainly might be:

The president, as reported by the Detroit Free Press, “said he believes there is no economic risk to workers organizing and making a living wage.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, meanwhile, quoted Obama as saying he didn’t “buy the argument that providing workers with collective-bargaining rights somehow weakens the economy or worsens the business environment.” Moreover, the paper reported that Obama “would not urge a delay in consideration of the Employee Free Choice Act.”

When I read this, my reaction was a fist pump – perhaps the first full-on fist pump I’ve been moved to engage in since the inauguration.

Fist pumps?  Doesn’t Obama even have the courtesy to give you a reach-around?  C’mon Dave, put down the Kool-aid and step away from the punch bowl.  If he cared about you he wouldn’t avoid you in public. 

When was Obama ever an “economic populist?”  When he was bashing NAFTA in Ohio while secretly telling the Canadians he didn’t mean it?  Would an economic populist want to privatize social security?  Wouldn’t an economic populist make universal health care a top priority?

Haven’t you figured out yet that you have to parse Obama’s words carefully?  How come Obama didn’t say he “would not urge a delay in passage of the Employee Free Choice Act?”  Quit falling for all the smooth talk and demand a commitment.  As my grandma would say “It don’t mean a thing if you don’t get that ring.”