Obama says that he wants to raise taxes on the rich, on the top two or three percent income earners, on Big Oil, on executive jets, on capital gains. In other words, not on you. Not on more than 90% of Americans. Republicans respond, “Obama wants to raise your taxes. He’ll raise taxes on your boss and your boss will fire you in retaliation. That guy who was going to offer you a job will change his mind. Tax hikes will kill the economy and you’ll get screwed.”
Polling that shows that the vast majority of Americans, including moderates and independents, favor taxing the rich to balance the budget do not factor in the fact that people are subjected to a relentless drumbeat of anti-tax rhetoric, even from people like Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist. They cynically (and falsely) claim that Obama is proposing these taxes to fire up his base despite the fact that he’s turning off moderates and independents. The truth is, moderates and independents endorse the president’s proposals in large numbers until they are subjected to people like Mark Penn telling them it is class warfare.
Barack Obama is careening down the wrong path towards re-election.
He should be working as a president, not a candidate.
He should be claiming the vital center, not abandoning it.
He should be holding down taxes rather than raising them.
He should be mastering the global economy, not running away from it.
And most of all, he should be bringing the country together rather than dividing it through class warfare.
Yes, too bad Obama won and Mark Penn isn’t running the show in the White House. Because Mark Penn is not only a man of the people, but he has his finger on their pulse.
What kind of pollster is it who doesn’t report what the people want but misreports what they want in order to confuse them and turn them against Democratic policies? He isn’t a Democratic pollster or a Republican pollster. He’s a pollster for the elite. He tries to shape opinion, not measure it. But, he’s not alone. This is the basic dynamic progressives face. The Democratic Party is the only viable vehicle we have. It is certainly the only vehicle we have capable of warding off a right-wing revolution in this country. But the rich have their fingers on the scale off both parties, tilting them away from policies that the people say they want.
The Villagers are restless.
And rightly so. There are 200 people camping out and a thousand in the daytime in the shadow of Wall Street.
Obama saying that we have to tax rich people in order to begin to pay off our deficit is ‘class warfare’. Riiiight.
Never mind the fact that a lot of these rich people’s wealth is based on the very money that created that deficit in the first place.
Not to mention that the government mostly functions to move money upward, not downward.
If this is class warfare, it is only so because it takes two sides to fight, and this has been completely one sided for decades.
It’s been more like a class massacre.
Mark Penn should be unemployed. Who is paying his freight these days?
Hillary Clinton should have sued him for malpractice for the way he handled her campaign. In some respects he was Barack Obama’s best asset in the primaries.
The other thing people don’t want to talk about is that that creep is one of the reasons people voted against Hillary. For all the bitching and moaning I might do, I’ve never said Hillary would have done any better. And idiots like Mark Penn are the reason why. Why would any self respecting Democrat have that clown run their campaign?
Are you kidding?
The operative word was “should”, based on performance. Yes, I recognize that there is a Village welfare system and results don’t matter. Once you’re in you are generally in.
One of the supreme perks of the consultant-pundit-pol complex: being wrong about everything and never suffering the consequences.
Actual Class Warfare
Penn is a human rodent
Mark Penn looks like somebody who smells bad.
He does smell bad. It’s coming through my headphones and ruining the Alice Coltrane record I’m listening to.
Sour grapes have had a long season this year.
Such a scum bag and represents everything that is wrong with parts of the Democratic establishment. My 27 year old step brother has been on unemployment for over 2 years because the construction industry is in terrible shape and this ahole is whining about tax rates for rich people like himself. F this guy.
The operative word was “should”, based on performance. Yes, I recognize that there is a Village welfare system and results don’t matter. Once you’re in you are generally in.
Mark Penn is a canker on our body politic, and given his losing track record it is a sign of the fundamental sickness of our political discourse that he appears publicly in anything other than irons.
There’s money, though, for white progressives who are willing to undermine Black Presidents. That’s his game.
Penn is not a Progressive. He’s a shit stain on the human race.
You’re absolutely right about Penn. My mind wanders. I was thinking about Hamsher or now, clearly, Kos.
Except Kos isn’t white. He’s sure profiting off whiteness, though.