In the year Obama spent trying to get health-care reform through Congress, he never emphasized what a blow the law would strike against growing inequality—the first serious one in decades. (After Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, it was left to David Leonhardt, in a front-page column in the Times, to do the explaining.) ... George Packer, New Yorker
George Packer makes a really good point: it's only lately that President Obama has come to publicly recognize and talk about the problem of inequality in America. Packer walks us through Obama's two-plus years as president. He sees a gap between reality and White House rhetoric. Finally, in a speech in Kansas in December, Obama actually used the word "inequality."
While it was a relief to hear Obama directly address the most important long-term problem in America, it came very late—maybe too late. It’s all too clear what a costly mistake it was for the President not to have claimed this ground from the start. By planting his flag on responsibility, not fairness—by failing to tell the story of the past few decades and refusing to assign blame—he rendered his policies faceless. He allowed struggling Americans to believe that the policies existed to serve something called the government—not them. At the same time, he allowed his enemies to portray him as an elitist.
This is what I’ll be watching in 2012: whether Obama can overcome the great skepticism that the middle sixty percent feel toward him and his program. Whether he can hold on to the ground he staked in Osawatomie, and put the burden of defending unequal opportunity and an unfair economic system on the other side. Judging from Monday night’s debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the Republicans are going to do their best to help him. When they weren’t tearing into Mitt Romney for looting companies and putting workers on the street, they were vowing to cut taxes on the rich and repeal any attempt to hold Wall Street accountable. In the same breath they denounced inequality and pledged to do everything in their power to increase it. ...George Packer, New Yorker
There's plenty of time and opportunity to talk about inequality between now and November, particularly if Mr. Inequality -- Mitt Romney -- becomes the Republican nominee. And we've got the State of the Union coming up. And, as Packer points out grimly, the president is getting a lot of help from the group of Republican candidates right now.
When they weren’t tearing into Mitt Romney for looting companies and putting workers on the street, they were vowing to cut taxes on the rich and repeal any attempt to hold Wall Street accountable. In the same breath they denounced inequality and pledged to do everything in their power to increase it. ...George Packer, New Yorker
What Packer doesn't say -- something that seemed evident to me during the health care debate -- is that what Republicans mostly dislike about the healthcare plan is precisely that it promotes equality. Republicans don't want equality; it doesn't sit well with them. How much of this is due to ideology, I can't quantify. But instinct tells me that, as with most issues, Republican intransigence is about being against anything Democrats are for, not about ideology.
