Obama: retake economic agenda!

21 February 2011 |permalink | email article

Has the President lost the domestic narrative to the tea party? That’s the question raised by E.J. Dionne, the Washington Post columnist, who suggests that despite liberals making fun of them, the upstart partisans can claim victory in altering the country’s dialogue.

“Any fair examination of the news suggests that [Obama] is in danger of losing control of the national agenda again, just as he did during the stimulus and health-care battles.”

Dionne notes how striking the Tea Party’s influence is among Washington’s political elite, which looks down on the extremists on the right when they appear on Fox News but ends up carrying their water.

From my vantage perch it’s stunning to watch how aging GOP senators facing reelection like Sen. Orin Hatch are rushing to curry favor with the tea partiers, a viral version of the nativist No Nothing movement which infected American politics between 1845 and 1860.

Obama tried to make the pointing in his State of the Union address that budget cutting alone is too small an agenda and this is the time for more government to expand opportunities and strengthen the economy. That argument has been drowned out by the Tea Party which believes that every problem will be solved by cutting government programs.

It’s the mantra which President Reagan falsely sold to the nation by suggesting “that government is the problem.” In point of fact it was FDR, at the zenith of the Great Depression who put together a $3.3 billion construction program, the greatest public works program ever seen in the nation’s history.

Obama needs to regain the narrative, help reduce 9% unemployment by creating public jobs, rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and, most important, reign in the runaway hysteria fanned by Tea Party hawks.

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