...of course it's about the economy. But are people really stupid enough to believe Obama won't be successful at making it about something else? This man could walk on stage and talk about yesterday morning's crap and people would jump and cheer. It's sort of sickening.
Obama can flounder his way through his poor record as long as the economy slowly improves. But if things get worse, even Obama can't make something from nothing.
Nobody says that the Republicans have no ideas of how to squeeze a little more economic activity out of America. Such depends upon further degradation of life for working people , further concentration of economic power in fewer hands, and ravaging the environment for quick bucks.
You underestimate your adversary. Begin with the obvious: Dubya was arguably the worst President that we ever had. He ignored intelligence and allowed 9/11; he suborned perjury to get a war for his own glory that he wanted; he pushed a corrupt economic boom based upon easy credit through predatory lenders, making a mockery of thrift and caution necessary for the smooth functioning of business. In the end his economic policies led to a gigantic collapse of the financial system that required the massive nationalization of giant businesses in the financial industry. All of this would have been inexcusable for a bleeding-heart liberal. Yet this is by a conservative. Dubya the cheat and liar, Dubya the demagogue, Dubya the warmonger, Dubya the war criminal, Dubya the destroyer of Big Business, Dubya the Socialist.
President Obama has done right about everything that Dubya did wrong except to preserve the Dubya-era tax cuts for the super-rich. Sometimes one must make sordid deals with powers-that-be. The most dangerous meltdown of the American economy in nearly 80 years came to an abrupt end. The President has been able to sell off many of the rescued assets at a profit. He has gotten us out of one nasty war that his dreadful predecessor got us into. He whacked Osama bin Laden (and as it turns out, he really had no alternative). The anti-Americanism that flourished when Dubya was President is no more.
So we have no potential for a boom in real estate. Such is for the better. We need to know what we are doing before we have another one. Maybe you don't want a drunk driver getting behind the wheel of a car that replaces the one that he totaled by driving into a tree to avoid the pink elephants that he saw on the road. Maybe you want him to give up his pathological drinking before he drives again.
... Most of the left-right divide in history has been between debtors (Left) and creditors (Right). Debtors want an over- heated economy, perhaps with severe inflation, that eases paying off loans or even trivializing them. Creditors want debt to hurt so that it makes debtors go more under the heel of those who own the notes. Such is so even on a small scale: someone who lives in a cr@ppy apartment yet holds a whole-life insurance policy and a balance of a few thousand dollars in savings sees the world very differently than does someone who lives in a house that he struggles to meet payments on and is heavily in debt. As it is now, being heavily in debt is the norm for working people and a comparatively-small number of people have the Shylock role.
But you wouldn't know that.
