He’ll give a good speech, he’s a great speech giver, very talented that way, but his policies will be terrible — inadequate and counterproductive. He will be very empathetic, tell the stories of people struggling to show he gets it.
But his policies will fall short and often be more harm than good. He will undermine social security and medicare by giving people/business a tax break on the payroll tax (of course, he won’t say he is undermining social security and medicare — not as honest as the Republicans on those issues who do so with pride, Obama will be making a gift to us). He’ll offer corporate tax breaks for jobs — which will not create jobs because there is no demand to buy anything so tax breaks will be useless. (In fact higher taxes on the wealthy would do more to create jobs, low taxes result in profit taking, high taxes result in re-investment rather than taking profit.) And he’ll urge that we fix roads and bridges — that will be the only good thing in his speech, but it will be the smallest line item when it should be the largest. The cutbacks on government jobs at the state level is a big part of the jobs crisis but he will not offer the kind of state aid that could solve that. There are so many other things he should be proposing that will not get into the speech. I realize he has to deal with a truly idiotic Republican Party, but you do that as FDR did by drawing a line in the sand for what will actually work and insisting on it, not by proposing stuff that will not work. He needs to move the political spectrum, and he can do that, by proposing real solutions.
Then, he will follow that up in a week or ten days with more deficit cutting nonsense that will ensure the collapse continues.
As with everything he has done, he will start way to the center, in favor of market solutions and in the end will be totally inadequate (and often counterproductive, as with healthcare where things are getting worse). I have no confidence in him to even propose the right things, and less to fight for them.
Sorry for being so pessimistic, but the more I see the less I like.
It just seems to me that extreme reactions are becoming the norm, like this letter to the editor. They are not helpful and inaccurate in their extreme assessment of everything.
I too am a progressive and am not happy with how Obama has handled some things. But at least I would try to be more factual and give Obama credit for some things. Saying that Obama’s healthcare plan is “counterproductive and making things worse” an example of this. The Affordable Care Act has set us on a path of making health care available to all people. No other president has been able to do this. It is true that along this path there will problems and further revisions and at this point healthcare costs are increasing. But we have been set on the right path of including everyone first. Compare what is happening in Texas with what is happening in Massachusetts. They are both works in progress. In Texas a race to the bottom leaving out more and more people and in Massachusetts slow but steady movement to better and affordable healthcare to all…
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