After years of conservatives making sure that the government can’t work for average citizens and destroying it on purpose and the Democrats who actually do for the most part still care about governing but have decided to chase after the corporate teat and be Republican light to keep getting re-elected, Chris Matthews and his panel seem completely oblivious to the reasons that anyone who’s paying an ounce of attention to how they’re acting might just be more than a little pissed off at what’s going on in Washington right now.
The subjects for his panel for the day are “Will Obama Recalibrate His Agenda In Response To Voter Outrage?” and “White Flight: Why Have Working Class Whites Abandoned Obama?” Here are some of the highlights of their responses.
Matthews asks if Obama should have restored “faith in positive government” before trying to reform health care. David Brooks responds.
Brooks: Yeah, what’s the biggest issue of our lifetime? It’s that people used to trust government in the New Deal and the Great Society. Now like 17% of Americans trust government. And this distrust of government has been building and building and building. And Massachusetts is a phenomenon of that. And so the question before the Democrats is do we listen to the people and say hey, we’re scaling back, or do we say we really believe in our agenda, we don’t care what you say. We believe in it so much we’re going forward. And that’s the crucial decision they have.
Matthews: And it seems like it’s… they don’t trust government to do things for you. It’s not just get the roads plowed or something; it’s this kind of social program.
Brooks: Obama trusts government. I really think that’s what the election of Obama was about. They want to have a government that can do the basics for them. They don’t want it to take over their lives, but do the basics, provide some security and the disillusion now comes from those lost hopes.
Matthews: Do you think Clarence now that the administration, these smart guys around the President, he especially, misread his mandate and said they didn’t like Bush, they didn’t like Cheney, so they’re going to like a real liberal, even leftist kind of government? Did they misread it?
The supposed liberal on the panel, Clarence Page doesn’t bother to point out that Obama is not a “leftist”. Thanks Clarence. Then Kathleen Parker decides to impart some of her wisdom on us.
Parker: Well first of all, Barack Obama had one mandate, and that was to not be George W. Bush and he should have known from the Clintons that any time you tack left, you go in the hole. You know he was elected by all of these former Republicans and independents because they thought he was going to be a centrist leader and he projected that on the campaign. So you know, he’s got to come back center.
The conversation moves on to more foolishness like pretending that Obama has not already done enough to court Republicans and the likes of Olympia Snowe. Just what planet are these people living on? Matthews and his panel seem to think that no one in the country has paid an ounce of attention to how Obama has governed or how the Republicans have responded and obstructed.
He's not losing support because he tacked to the left. He's losing suppport because he tacked to the right and looks like he cares more about the banks and Wall Street than the working class. He's losing support because he's gone back on campaign promises. He's losing support because he's saying one thing in public and doing the opposite behind closed doors. He's losing support because he's got to work with a bunch of ConservaDems and he's looking like it doesn't bother him a bit. And if President Obama doesn't start doing something to get people back to work he's going to lose more support. Sadly the Republicans, the ConservaDems and the Villagers who live in opposite land like this bunch will be happy to help him along.
