David Brooks: To Hell With the Polls! President Obama Should Not Campaign on Raising Taxes on the Rich
Click here to view this media As our own Driftglass rightfully pointed out this week , apparently David Brooks has got his panties in a bunch because heaven forbid anyone is paying attention to what the dirty, filthy, hippies in the Occupy Wall Street movement are complaining about, as opposed to those lovely “adult” “centrists” he loves to carry water for that are calling for austerity measures, despite the fact that, as Driftie noted in his post, there is overwhelming support for taxing ultra wealthy Americans. Here’s Brooks doing his best to spin his way around those inconvenient facts on this weekend’s Meet the Press : GREGORY: But, but, David, David Brooks, this is an interesting poll that shows whom the American people blame for economic problems in the country; 78 percent blame Wall Street, 87 percent blame the federal government. One of the big questions that you’ve posed about President Obama is, can he run a conventionally liberal campaign, a populist campaign, tax the rich more, and prevail? BROOKS: No. You know, the most important polling statistic in our lifetime is they ask people, “Do you trust government to do the right thing most of the time?” Through the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, it was like 80 percent trusted government. Then that drops–Vietnam, Watergate–gets down to like 20 percent under Bush. Well, now it’s down at an historic low point of 15 percent. So if you’re a Democrat, the party of government, you can’t run “I’m the–I’m government, he’s the market,” you cannot run that campaign. You have to confuse that debate the way Bill Clinton did, the way Obama did in ’08, by being post-partisan. What I see Obama doing is being the liberal fighter over the last couple of months, and that may help with the fundraising, but I do not see that winning. Brooks also ignores the fact that a good part of the reason most Americans don’t have any faith in our government working is because that is exactly what Republicans want them to think. They run the government like a personal piggy-bank for their campaign contributors when they’re in charge and then they muck up the works and make sure government is incapable of doing anything for working class people while they’re in the minority, and with sadly enough help from enough Conserva-Dems aiding and abetting them get away with it. This country and the voters are not fed up because there isn’t enough bipartisanship in our Congress. They’re fed up because what bipartisanship there is has meant that conservative legislation has been passed that’s doing real harm to the working class and that there aren’t enough people in our halls of Congress looking out for their interests. If David Brooks thinks Americans are fed up with government, he needs to take a look in the mirror with the type of snake oil he’s been helping to sell them since he’s unfortunately been given a national spotlight to try to gloss over how damaging conservative policies have been to the working class. And if he thinks an earnest attempt to level the playing field a bit and raise taxes on the rich is going to be harmful to Democrats in the upcoming election, I think he should be sharing a bit of what he’s been smoking with the rest of us.
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on October 24, 2011. Filed under