"Pushing President Obama from the Left...

[SHRED]

...and defending President Obama from the Right."

I think we need to keep the above principle first and foremost.

Here is an article that woke me up (again) from the SOTU speech.
This, I consider, is a "pushing from the Left" albeit a somewhat bitter reality for some here I am sure:

Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton
Posted on Jan 26, 2012
By Robert Scheer

~snip~

When Obama declared Tuesday evening “no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas,” wasn’t he aware that Jeffrey Immelt, the man he appointed to head his jobs council, is the most egregious offender? Immelt, the CEO of GE, heads a company with most of its workers employed in foreign countries, a corporation that makes 82 percent of its profit abroad and has paid no U.S. taxes in the past three years.

It was also a bit bizarre for Obama to celebrate Steve Jobs as a model entrepreneur when the manufacturing jobs that the late Apple CEO created are in the same China that elsewhere in his speech the president sought to scapegoat for America’s problems. Apple, in its latest report on the subject, takes pride in attempting to limit the company’s overseas suppliers to a maximum workweek of 60 hours for their horribly exploited employees. Isn’t it weird to be chauvinistically China baiting when that country carries much of our debt?

I’m also getting tired of the exhortations to improve the nation’s schools, certainly a worthy endeavor, but this economic crisis is the result not of high school dropouts as Obama suggested, but rather the corruption of the best and brightest graduates of our elite academies. As Obama well knows from his own trajectory in the meritocracy, which took him from one of the most privileged schools in otherwise educationally depressed Hawaii to Harvard Law, the folks who concocted the mathematical formulas and wrote the laws justifying fraudulent collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were his overachieving professors and classmates.

If he doesn’t know that, he should check out the record of Lawrence Summers, the man he picked to guide his economic program and who had been rewarded with the presidency of Harvard after having engineered Clinton’s deregulatory deal with Wall Street.

FULL ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obamas_faux_populism_sounds_like_bill_clinton_20120126/

---

[AnotherMcIntosh]

1. What's the best response to Robert Scheer's question?

“When Obama declared Tuesday evening 'no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas,' wasn’t he aware that Jeffrey Immelt, the man he appointed to head his jobs council, is the most egregious offender? Immelt, the CEO of GE, heads a company with most of its workers employed in foreign countries, a corporation that makes 82 percent of its profit abroad and has paid no U.S. taxes in the past three years.”

A. Scheer is a "purist."

B. Scheer must want a Republican like Gingrich or Rmoney in the White House.

C. Scheer is being too impatient and he should wait until after the re-election.

D. All of the above.

[SammyWinstonJack]

6. All of the above.

[T S Justly]

2. K&R (nt)

[leveymg]

3. There you go. Blaming the rich and powerful again for problems caused by welfare queens and unions

Cheeze-itz, doesn't Scheer know that austerity and maybe another war or two will surely get the economy back into shape, if only we can get rid of all those useless subsidized lunch eaters?

[ProSense]

4. This

"Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton "

...doesn't even make sense.

Obama to Draw an Economic Line in State of Union

By JACKIE CALMES

<...>

Mr. Obama’s third State of the Union address is widely seen in parallel with the one delivered in 1996 by President Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton likewise was seeking re-election, after voters in the midterm elections had put Republicans in power in Congress as a rebuke to his perceived big-government liberalism.

Yet Mr. Obama is charting an opposite response. While Mr. Clinton sought to co-opt Republicans’ small-government message — his State of the Union line “the era of big government is over” is among the most memorable of his presidency — Mr. Obama is confronting it, and framing the election-year debate in a way that aides say will challenge Republicans’ view of the role of government in a time of economic transition.

-more -

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/us/politics/obama-to-draw-an-economic-line-in-state-of-union.html

<...>

It is odd that Bill Clinton’s imagined role as ass-kicking economic savior has become the object of such extensive liberal fantasy. We don’t have to speculate as to what Clinton would have done if Republicans had blocked his economic stimulus. It actually happened. Clinton had campaigned promising a stimulus bill to alleviate widespread economic pain, with unemployment at 7.5 percent at the start of his term. Like Obama, Clinton needed a handful of Republican senators to pass it (Obama needed two Republican votes to break a filibuster, Clinton three). Clinton’s proposed stimulus was $19.5 billion. Unable to break a Republican filibuster, Clinton offered to pare it down to $15.4 billion. Republicans killed it anyway, creating an image of a Clinton administration in disarray.

Certainly, the circumstances faced by Clinton were different. (For one thing, the recession was far less deep and passed its worst point shortly after he took office, making the case for stimulus less urgent.) Still, nothing in this episode suggests Clinton possessed any special communicative or legislative skill that would have enabled him or his wife, had either held office in 2009, to pass a larger stimulus than the $787 billion bill Obama signed.

<...>

The rest of Clinton’s first two years consisted of a demoralizing procession of debacles and retreats. A series of Clinton appointments—Lani Guinier, Zoe Baird—came under conservative fire and were withdrawn in a panic. He steered his agenda toward right-of-center goals, like the North American Free Trade Agreement and a crime bill, serving only to alienate his liberal allies without dampening hysterical attacks from conservatives and the business lobby. Health-care reform collapsed entirely, in part because liberals refused to support a compromise final measure. Six months into Clinton’s presidency, after he had abandoned his effort to integrate gays into the military, Bob Herbert summarized what had already settled as the liberal narrative: “The disappointment and disillusionment with President Clinton are widespread … He doesn’t seem to understand that much of the disappointment and disillusionment is because he tries so hard to be liked by everyone.” Hardly anybody contested that portrait.

After Republicans swept the midterm elections, Clinton moved further rightward. He famously declared that “the era of big government is over” and brought in reptilian operator Dick Morris—not yet the right-wing conspiracy-monger seen on Fox News these days, but distinctly right of center—as his chief political adviser. He signed a welfare-reform bill containing such Draconian provisions that several liberals resigned from his administration in protest.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/liberals-jonathan-chait-2011-11/

From the OP:

As Gingrich put it in the first Republican debate in South Carolina: “As speaker ... working with President Bill Clinton, we passed a very Reagan-like program, less regulation, lower taxes.” Even the 15 percent tax break that Mitt Romney exploited for his carryover private equity income was a result of the unholy Clinton-Gingrich alliance. Both principals of that alliance were pimps for the financial industry, and that includes Freddie Mac, the for-profit stock-traded housing agency that Clinton coddled while it stoked the Ponzi scheme in housing and that rewarded the former speaker with $1.6 million to $1.8 million in consulting fees.

There were, finally, some bold words in Obama’s speech about helping beleaguered homeowners, but they ring hollow given this administration’s efforts to broker a sweetheart deal between the leading banks and the state attorneys general that would see the banks fined only a pittance for their responsibility in the mortgage meltdown. Obama could have had success demanding mortgage relief if he had made that a condition for bailing out the banks. Now the banksters know he’s firing blanks, and they are placing their bets on their more reliable Republican allies to prevent any significant demand for helping homeowners with their underwater mortgages.

Was this written in a time warp?

[Edweird]

5. Which is why Obama's talk is cheap to me.

Like the promise to get rid of Geithner - after the election. It's 'candidate Obama' all over again.

[SammyWinstonJack]

7. It's 'candidate Obama' all over again. And when he reverts back to the Obama of the past 3+ years

after re-election, how will his most ardent fans be able to defend him, still?

[xchrom]

8. Du rec. Nt

[Citizen Worker]

9. Scheer cogently points out, without saying so, the fallacy of voting for the lesser of two evils.

We desperately need to do the necessary work to form an alternative to the two party duopoly.