Afraid to Stoke Populist Ire, Obama Abandons 'Inequality' Rhetoric-
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- Jon Queally, staff writer
As reported by the Washington Post on Saturday, President Obama is heeding the instructions and advice of pollsters and political consultants as the administration abandons its flirtation with populist rhetoric and a brief White House push to make the scourge of economic inequality a political issue.
Instead, according to officials who spoke to the Post's Zachary Goldfarb, the administration will pivot towards more "politically palatable" messaging less likely to draw critique from Wall Street and the political right.
According to Goldfarb's reporting, the shift in tactics hints at a broader repositioning of Democratic messaging ahead of the midterm elections and, perhaps, the 2016 presidential race. House and Senate strategists and their pollsters have concluded that they should focus less on the wealth gap and more on emphasizing that all Americans should have economic “opportunity” to get ahead or a “fair shot.”
“Both the White House and the Senate agreed that the decline of middle-class incomes was the most serious issue we face in this country, but the focus had to be on how to get middle-class incomes up, rather than drive other people’s incomes down,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), the messaging chief for Senate Democrats.
He added, “There are some who believe it’s better to talk about the negative parts of wealth that people have accumulated, but our polling data show people care less about that and more about how we’re going to help them.”
But many liberal Democrats, represented most prominently by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), have been pushing an increasingly populist economic agenda. Some warn against papering over the wealth gap with euphemisms.
On the progressive left, both inside and outside of the Democratic Party, much new energy is being funneled into the idea that a "new populist moment" is the only hope for reinvigorating a progressive agenda in the face of election cycles increasingly dominated by the interests of big money donors and corporate cash.
This month, The Nation magazine dedicated an entire issue to ideas around 'progressive strategies" for this new "populist moment." In one essay, written by Rev. William J. Barber, head of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and the chief political voice of the Moral Monday movement taking shape in the south, said that the only winnable strategy is one that transcends the major parties, the normal divisions, and focuses on deep forms of justice while articulating a clear vision.
"We need a transformative movement—state-based, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, pro-justice," he said. "We need to build for the long term, not around one issue or campaign.
More with commentary from Robert Borosage at:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/07/05-0
= new reply since forum marked as read
. . . the article offers nothing but innuendo and rumor.
here's an article just today, posted on the White House blog . . .
States Lead On Minimum Wage. Is Congress Listening?
In March, President Obama and I visited Central Connecticut State University with four New England governors who are leading the charge to reward hard work with a fair wage. Three weeks after our visit, Gov. Dannel Malloy of Connecticut signed a bill raising Connecticut’s minimum wage. And in the last month alone, Govs. Peter Shumlin of Vermont, Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and ? as recently as last Wednesday ? Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island have followed suit.
President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the minimum wage at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut
These state leaders are answering the call of low-wage workers who want nothing more than the dignity of being able to support their families, men and women who have to make heartbreaking decisions every day about which bill to pay or which meal to skip. These governors and their legislatures are also listening to employers who understand that paying higher wages is a sound bottom-line investment, leading to more consumer spending, which helps businesses to compete and the economy to grow.
read: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/07/07/states-lead-minimum-wage-congress-listening
here's what the President said on July 1st:
Republicans in Congress, they’re patriots, they love their country, they love their families. They just have a flawed theory of the economy that they can’t seem to get past. They believe that all we should be doing is giving more tax breaks to those at the top, eliminating regulations that stop big banks or polluters from doing what they want, cut the safety net for people trying to work their way into the middle class, and then somehow the economy is going to get stronger and jobs and prosperity trickle down to everybody. That’s their worldview. I’m sure they sincerely believe it. It’s just not accurate. It does not work.
We know from our history our economy doesn’t grow from the top down; it grows from the middle out. We do better when you’ve got some construction workers on the job. They then go to a restaurant and they buy a new car. That means the workers there start doing better. Everybody does better. And we could be doing so much more if Republicans in Congress were less interested in stacking the deck in favor of those at the top or trying to score political points, or purposely trying to gridlock Washington, and just tried to get some things done to grow the economy for everybody. We could do so much more if we just rallied around an economic patriotism, a sense that our job is to get things done as one nation and as one people.
Economic patriotism would say that instead of protecting corporations that are shipping jobs overseas, let’s make sure they’re paying their fair share of taxes, let’s reward American workers and businesses that hire them. Let’s put people to work rebuilding America. Let’s invest in manufacturing, so the next generation of good manufacturing jobs are right here, made in the USA. That would be something to celebrate on the 4th of July.
Economic patriotism says that instead of stacking the deck in the favor of folks just at the top, let’s harness the talents and ingenuity of every American and give every child access to quality education, and make sure that if your job was stamped obsolete or shipped overseas, you’re going to get retrained for an even better job. )
Economic patriotism says that instead of making it tougher for middle-class families to get ahead, let’s reward hard work for every American. Let’s make sure women earn pay that’s equal to their efforts. Let’s make sure families can make ends meet if their child gets sick and they need to take a day off. Let’s make sure no American who works full-time ever has to live in poverty.
Let’s tell everybody they’re worth something. No matter who you are, no matter what you look like, where you come from, who you love, if you work hard, if you’re responsible, you can make it here in America. That’s what this country was founded on, that idea. That’s why I ran for this office. I think sometimes about what we could be accomplishing, what we could have accomplished this past year, what we could have accomplished the year before that. And typically what gets reported on is just the politics -- well, you know, they’re not doing this because they don’t want to give Obama a victory or oh, well, we don’t want to do this right now because maybe the midterm election is coming up and, oh, well, what’s happening with the polls. People don’t care about that. People just want to see some results. And objectively, if you look at the agenda I’m putting forward, the things that we’re trying to get done like just fixing bridges and roads, it really shouldn’t be controversial. It hasn’t been controversial in the past.
And so part of the reason that I’m going to be spending a lot of time over the next several weeks and months getting out there with ordinary folks is just to report to you it’s not as if I don’t know that you could use some help. I know. It’s not as if we don’t have good plans to put more people back to work and raise their incomes and improve the quality of education. We know how to do it. That’s not the reason it’s not happening. It’s not happening because of politics.
And the only folks that can fix that are going to be you -- the American people and voters. Sometimes in our culture right now we just get cynical about stuff and we just assume things can’t change because nothing seems to change in this town. But that’s not true. It can change as long as everybody gets activated, as long as people still feel hopeful and we don’t fall prey to cynicism.
read: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/07/01/remarks-president-economy
