Give it away, part 2

When it comes to speculation I could not have found a more perfect example of the suspicions of sinister intent than Yves Smith in an article entitled Obama Wants to Be the President Who Rolled Back the New Deal.

Who, whom? Before trying to analyze the many facets of Smith's dramatic rendering of the possible ways the President wants to screw us, let us count off a few relevent groups of American attitudes.

1. Wall Street. The titans of financial folly love the President sooo much for saving their irresponsible asses and boosting the stock market to record levels right? Not so much.

2. Seniors. You would think the people most likely to be alive and not poverty-stricken because of Social Security and Medicare could be considered shoo-ins for supporting Barack Obama. After all, he is the leader of the party that invented and instituted them right? Ugh.

3. Republicans. Umm, we'll get back to them.

4. How about the Very Serious People inside the Beltway? According to Paul Krugman the VSPs have been howling about the need to "fix" Social Security for years now. So it would seem this is the group the President is trying to win by appearing "serious" himself about balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and vulnerable.

There is no more pretense possible. As we’ve warned for some time, Obama is eager to put a notch on his belt by being the President that rolled back the New Deal programs that helped create broad-based middle-class prosperity and dignity. He’s cast himself as an adult inflicting discipline on profligate Americans.
 

So begins Smith's warning. The pretense being that President Obama was ever a liberal or even a Democrat in the first place. After naming the real culprits and their very real crimes, Smith gives his reasons.

 He seems spectacularly unwilling to take on anyone even remotely approaching his size (as if a President should be cowed by senior banker bullies like Jamie Dimon). The President’s failure to reprimand the financial CEOs who dissed him by refusing to attend his address on the first year anniversary of Lehman was a tacit acknowledgement that they were really in the driver’s seat.
 

Furthermore, "We are not in the realm of Obama kayfabe, where he pretends that those big bad Republicans forced him to do what he wanted to do all along. This is Obama’s budget offer, not the result of pretend hard fought battles over positions that are at most 10 degrees apart." I had to look that one up too, "kayfabe" is usually referred to by unhappy liberal bloggers and commenters as 'kabuki theater'. I am not going to defend the President's proposals but I am not willing to assent to this kind of cynicism either.

Smith makes several valid points, such as how this proposal will fund universal preschool (a favorite but limited panacea among very serious liberals, according to James Galbraith ) with regressive taxes on smokers. Yeah. Beating up on smokers is a great credential for very serious people. Also practically useless and counterproductive from an economic (reducing purchasing power) and political (alienating working class voters). But it makes sophisticated liberals feel like they've done something useful without actually engaging the dark lords of finance. Unfortunately, he then jumps to an Argumentum ad Populum by citing all the critical comments to the NYTimes story reporting the chained CPI proposal. Democracy and the increased ability of regular Americans to voice their opinions is a great thing, but pointing to the comment section and saying "see?" does not strengthen the argument. Resorting to logical fallacies rarely does. Neither does using obscure phrases such as "extreme porcine maquillage exercise" help get your point across, it just makes the writer look like a dick.