Joe Klein’s 2012 Scenario: Pragmatic Democrat vs. ‘Dangerous, Inbred’ Right-Wing GOP
Who on Earth would claim the next election matchup is Pragmatic Democrat vs. Radical End-of-All-Regulation Republican? Time’s Joe Klein would, in Time’s June 27 cover story on the GOP candidates. He ended the piece like this: Some presidential campaigns – 1960, 1980, 1992, 2008 – are exhilarating, suffused with hope and excitement. This is not likely to be one of those. It is likely to be an election that no one wins but someone loses. It will be a reversal of politics past: a pragmatic Democrat will be facing a Republican with all sorts of big ideas, promising an unregulated, laissez-faire American paradise. Obama will have to come up with a stronger argument than “It could have been worse,” but in tough times, the continuing presence of a government safety net is far more reassuring than the message that you're on your own. And in the end, all the Republican talk of repealing and defunding may prove too radical for an American public that is conservative in the traditional sense, and wary of sudden lurches to the left or right. Joe Klein is about as honest in this passage as he was when he spent months denying he was the “Anonymous” author of Primary Colors. If Americans don’t want “sudden lurches” to an ideological pole, what would Klein call the first two years of Obama? Its radical increase in spending and debt was hardly what America was promised by…well, Joe Klein four years ago , at a similar juncture in 2007. Obama was pragmatic, even conservative: “But Obama's is a determinedly conservative boldness. He is a lovely speaker, yet his tone is more conversational than oratorical. He offers little in the way of red-meat rhetoric to his audiences, some of whom are surprised, and disappointed, by his persistent judiciousness. He is solid on the essentials of most issues but daring on none
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on June 24, 2011. Filed under