You know, I think this David Dayen post on the Clinton speech explains for me why I have such an instinctive mistrust of Barack Obama. He doesn’t really try to explain his policies to the voters, he simply tries to manipulate them. (Remember the public option pledge?) The man has spent his first term trying to cut back-door deals on Social Security and Medicare. My feeling is, if he thinks he had a really good reason to do so, he should discuss it out in the open:
Bill Clinton is one of the few politicians that bothers to try and tell the public what is happening in their lives and how that connects to what happens in Washington. It’s shaded to his advantage, like approximately every politician ever. And I don’t agree with all of it – he tried to peddle some structural unemployment stuff that economists agree on all sides pretty much agree with.
But this is a deficit in our politics. The public has a very low political literacy, and one of the reasons for that, despite a dysfunctional media, is that politicians don’t bother to take the time to explain the consequences of their policies. This leaves them reaching for their own trusted sources, and open to the worst kinds of distortions. Clinton, in his down-home kind of way, tried to reel back those distortions. He fact-checked the Republicans on welfare. He fact-checked them on Medicare – and in so doing, downplayed a bit the potential effects of cutting provider payments on access to hospitals and doctors, but SO WHAT? I’m tired of this belief that we cannot cut pay for vastly overpaid health care providers. Anyway, the providers voluntarily agreed to the cuts, because they knew they’d get more customers in the bargain. And Medicare Advantage lost some of its subsidies and now has more subscribers at a lower cost. Clinton got into that.
Go read the rest.
Clinton’s style is in a league all its own. Part southern good old boy preacher, part egomaniac, and part political infighter.
We won’t see another like him in our lifetime, but as he himself has mentioned many times before, he’s from another time.
For anyone paying attention: mistrust every politician. Always do your own fact checking. If it sounds too good to be true; it is. Anyone who believes that Bill Clinton is any more trustworthy than Obama is…….oh, forget it. You wouldn’t pay any attention to the reasons he’s not anyway.
Yes, Clinton out and out said Simpson-Bowles. Obama will push it through behind closed doors while lying to our faces that it’s all just a “tweak” and not a decision to further deflate the economy to the benefit of creditors while shafting the poor and the elderly for a so-called “deficit” problem created by gifts to the wealthy and the war profiteers.
Those two words were the most important in Clinton’s speech; the rest was airbrushing (like not saying fracking and instead saying energy “independence.)
Yup he just couldn’t pass on Simpson/Bowles, neo-liberal that he is. But if you want to see his true stripes come out and do some more damage, just wait till the final weeks of this campaign when the Republicans go public with his backstage encouragement to Paul Ryan to stick to his guns on those Medicare cuts. When that little video hits some of the swooning around here is going to look damn naive.