Thoughts on the SOTU – Just what The Village ordered

It was a good enough speech.  It was just what the beltway pundits and Washington elites, aka The Village, wanted to hear.  This from James Galbraith, (tip to Dan Froomkin), sums it up very well.

Overall, this is a terrific thematic speech. It sets out important goals, for the most part in the right areas: research, technology, infrastructure, education, jobs. The priority for clean energy is clear (though if the word “conservation” is mentioned, I missed it.) It speaks broadly of health care cost control, not narrowly of cuts to Medicare. It appears to support, or at least does not contradict, the emerging bipartisan consensus that Social Security benefits should not be cut. The weasel-word “entitlements” does not appear. It lends a word of support to some of the nation’s most embattled public-sector employees – teachers. It is compassionate and sensible on immigrants and immigration. It defends the vital role of regulation in a market system. It does not waste many words on the deficit or the national debt or the fiscal commission.

Having set out these goals and priorities, there are practically no actual legislative proposals here. It’s not a governing speech. If the administration plans to make proposals to this Congress, it will have to do so later. If proposed, they will not be enacted. So this is a speech that is intended to put the Republicans on the rhetorical defensive, and perhaps to launch the 2012 campaign. No doubt, this is strategy.

The proposed “spending freeze” is bad policy. But it’s very hard to see how a freeze on overall domestic discretionary spending can be reconciled with an investment program. Which is the real policy? Possibly neither. We’ll see in the budget.

Other missing words: “unemployment,” “unemployment insurance,” “foreclosure crisis,” “poverty,” “financial fraud,” “prosecutions.” There’s nothing about bank credit. The victims of the economic crisis have become invisible, it would seem.

Sometimes a speech is remembered for what wasn’t said, not what was said. President Obama with this speech was trying to fix what the White House perceived as his biggest problem area in his first two years – bad PR. He was not trying to speak to the people that are hurting because of unemployment, foreclosure, poverty, etc… It was clear he was trying to fix a perception/PR problem with The Village. It was also notable for it’s lack of a call for sacrifice from those who have profited so much off our current economic system.

This statement is about right, Obama is looking more like Herbert Hoover every day.

Read the speech here.

Watch the speech here.

The Crux

The crux of the problem regarding our current economic situation is that the old axiom, what’s good for [Insert Corproation Name Here] is good for America is no longer, (if it ever was), true. American workers owe what they have been able to get over the years to labor unions, not corporations.

Paul Krugman described the “crux” pretty well yesterday, The Competition Myth.

But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No.

Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?

Still, you might say that talk of competitiveness helps Mr. Obama quiet claims that he’s anti-business. That’s fine, as long as he realizes that the interests of nominally “American” corporations and the interests of the nation, which were never the same, are now less aligned than ever before.

[...]

So what does the administration’s embrace of the rhetoric of competitiveness mean for economic policy?

The favorable interpretation, as I said, is that it’s just packaging for an economic strategy centered on public investment, investment that’s actually about creating jobs now while promoting longer-term growth. The unfavorable interpretation is that Mr. Obama and his advisers really believe that the economy is ailing because they’ve been too tough on business, and that what America needs now is corporate tax cuts and across-the-board deregulation.

My guess is that we’re mainly talking about packaging here. And if the president does propose a serious increase in spending on infrastructure and education, I’ll be pleased.

But even if he proposes good policies, the fact that Mr. Obama feels the need to wrap these policies in bad metaphors is a sad commentary on the state of our discourse.

The financial crisis of 2008 was a teachable moment, an object lesson in what can go wrong if you trust a market economy to regulate itself. Nor should we forget that highly regulated economies, like Germany, did a much better job than we did at sustaining employment after the crisis hit. For whatever reason, however, the teachable moment came and went with nothing learned.

Mr. Obama himself may do all right: his approval rating is up, the economy is showing signs of life, and his chances of re-election look pretty good. But the ideology that brought economic disaster in 2008 is back on top — and seems likely to stay there until it brings disaster again.

In essence nothing has changed for the American worker from where it was in 2008. And that is the crux of the problem.

Obama will make huge mistake if he goes after Social Security

President Barack Obama is becoming a bigger disappointment to this New Deal Democrat by the day. If his speech inst’ about jobs, helping homeowners who are about to be foreclosed, and in general helping to recreate the middle class then it will be a failure.

As Dan Froomkin showed last week he’s playing with fire if he goes after Social Security, Obama’s Social Security Talk Is Turning Voters Off, Pollsters Say.

President Barack Obama’s apparent willingness to consider cuts in Social Security benefits may be winning him points with Washington elites, but it’s killing him with voters, who see the program as inviolate and may start to wonder what the Democratic Party stands for, if not for Social Security.

That’s the conclusion of three top progressive pollsters who spoke to reporters Wednesday at a briefing sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, the Century Foundation and Demos.

“For the public, cutting benefits is the problem, not the solution,” said Guy Molyneux, a partner at Hart Research Associates.

As a result, the pollsters said that any Democrat seeking elected office in 2012 should be begging Obama not to say anything about Social Security cuts in his State of the Union address later this month.

A post-election poll by Celinda Lake’s Lake Research Partners found that, by a margin of 3 percentage points, Americans now trust Republicans in Congress more than Democrats when it comes to Social Security — surely the first time since the program became a signature issue for the Democratic Party in the 1930s.

The poll found confidence in Democrats on the issue dropping 14 points just since January 2007, accompanied by a 13-point increase for Republicans.

The public favors congressional Republicans over Obama on Social Security by an even larger 6-point margin. Obama’s 26-percent rating is not only less than half Bill Clinton’s (53 percent), it’s even lower than that of George W. Bush (37 percent), whose proposal to privatize the program went down in flames.

It’s hard to overstate how shocking this new dynamic is. In the two previous low points for Democrats — June 1995 and April 2002 — Democrats still had a 10-point advantage on Social Security.

That the public would trust Republicans more on this issue was, until recently, inconceivable.

And the fix for this is so simple. All President Obama has to do is keep his promise.

Thank you Keith Olbermann

You got me and my wife through many tough times during the Reign of Dubya. Your special comments,etc…made us feel sane during an insane time. Here are the two best reads I have found thus far on KO’s departure.

This one from Juan Cole, Olbermann Departs, as Media Consolidate Further.

People are blaming the abrupt departure of Keith Olbermann from MSNBC on that company’s merger with Comcast and Olbermann’s loss of the protection and patronage of Jeff Zucker, the former head of NBC programming. MSNBC says that the issue has nothing to do with Comcast.

It seems Olbermann is too extreme for US television. But Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, now they are mainstream. What universe could that proposition be true in? That of cranky old white billionaires. And television news is owned by them. Not by you.

Whether Comcast is the villain of the piece directly, things like the Comcast merger with MSNBC are responsible for there being very few voices on American television (and despite the proliferation of channels) like Olbermann’s. And for there being relatively little news on the “news” programs. Time Warner, General Electric and Comcast (partners in NBC), Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp own almost all television news. In other words, six big corporations determine what you will hear about the world if you get your news from television. There are fewer and fewer t.v. news outlets that do not belong to one of these six, a process called media consolidation.

For reasons of profit-seeking, when Disney acquired ABC, it looted the company’s news divisions. Profits are not to be had in hard news, but rather in tabloid news. It used to be that human interest stories would be ‘dessert,’ but they have become the main meal.

That sums it up pretty good. The media and “news” has mostly gone away. Now we have a bunch of gossip and bull$&!#.

Here’s a good suggestion on what KO should do now, Dear Keith Olbermann.

A special comment. 

I say this to every bigtime oldstream media celeb that I care about when they get booted out on their butts.  

They did you a favor.

But they sure didn’t do the rest of us a favor. 

What interest do your followers have in you being booted off the air? How exactly does that help them.

[...]

 

So here’s what I recommend. Borrow a page from Conan O’Brien’s playbook, and use the social network to communicate with your fans.  

Get a video camera and put it in your living room or den at home. Hit Record. Sit down in front of the camera and rant for 15 minutes. You can do that, I’m sure. Then without any production at all, upload it to YouTube and send the link around on Twitter. The first time you do it, it will be the most watched video of the day. Far more people will see it than used to see you on MSNBC, or O’Reilly or Beck or any of them. Depending on how fresh and interesting it is, and how real it is, and how compelling you really are (I know that’s a lot of “depends”) there won’t be much of a dropoff on Day 2 and 3 and so on. Now you’ve got your own network. And no one can shut you down. And you’ll have a lot more people watching you. 

You might even get a chance to open people up to some new ideas and god forbid change a few minds. 

And when something dangerous and outrageous or just obnoxious happens, we’ll know where to find you. That’s kind of important.

Good night. 

And good luck. 

Thanks again and hope to see you soon.

Where we should be looking to cut the budget

Homeland Security, Homeland Security hasn’t made us safer.

Hardly anyone has seriously scrutinized either the priorities or the spending patterns of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), since their hurried creation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Sure, they get criticized plenty. But year in, year out, they continue to grow faster and cost more — presumably because Americans think they are being protected from terrorism by all that spending. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that the agencies are making Americans any safer.

And Defense. (Stockman has some interesting ideas but I disagree with him about Keynesianism).

The Obama administration’s $78 billion cut to US defense spending is a mere “pin-prick” to a behemoth military-industrial complex that must drastically shrink for the good of the republic, a former Reagan administration budget director recently told Raw Story.

“It amounts to a failed opportunity to recognize that we are now at a historical inflection point at which the time has arrived for a classic post-war demobilization of the entire military establishment,” David Stockman said in an exclusive interview.

“The Cold War is long over,” he continued. “The wars of occupation are almost over and were complete failures — Afghanistan and Iraq. The American empire is done. There are no real seriously armed enemies left in the world that can possibly justify an $800 billion national defense and security establishment, including Homeland Security.”

Short of that, he suggested, the United States has “reached the point of no return” with its artificial creation of wealth, and will eventually face a sharp economic decline.

Yes, ending two wars, closing our “Empire of Bases“, as Chalmers Johnson called them, and recognizing that DHS was a bad idea would go a long way to cutting our budget and freeing up spending on what we need to spend our money on – health, education and infrastructure.

A microcosm of the Democrats problem

51 million, mostly lower-income, will do worse under new tax law.

The federal tax bill passed by Congress yesterday includes some extras for the middle class and lots of goodies for the wealthy. But individuals making less than $20,000 and households making less than $40,000 a year will actually get less tax relief in 2011 than they got in 2010 and 2009.

That is just horrible.

Hope and Optimism will not trickle down

The sad fact keeps coming back that too many in the Democratic Party have bought into the fallacy of “trickle-down economics” and corporate power.  They are no longer for working and middle class Americans first, which is the root of their decline over the last 30 years.  The greatest achievement of modern conservatism, and the Republican Party, is that they have turned the one protector of the people over the powerful, the government, into the perceived enemy of the people.  And too many in the Democratic Party, liberals, and progressives, have stood by and allowed it to happen and continue.

When the people feel they can no longer turn to their government for help in troubled times it takes away their optimism and makes them feel less hopeful for the future.  Looking at this recent PEW article about the differences between how Americans responded during the Great Depression and how they’re responding now, bears that out.

As the Pew Research Center’s analysis of exit poll data concluded, “the outcome of this year’s election represented a repudiation of the political status quo…. Fully 74% said they were either angry or dissatisfied with the federal government, and 73% disapproved of the job Congress is doing.”

This outlook is in interesting contrast with many of the public’s views during the Great Depression of the 1930s, not only on economic, political and social issues, but also on the role of government in addressing them.

Quite unlike today’s public, what Depression-era Americans wanted from their government was, on many counts, more not less. And despite their far more dire economic straits, they remained more optimistic than today’s public. Nor did average Americans then turn their ire upon their Groton-Harvard-educated president — this despite his failure, over his first term in office, to bring a swift end to their hardship. FDR had his detractors but these tended to be fellow members of the social and economic elite.

Still, as now, the public had some reservations about the stretch of government power and found little consensus on specific policies with which to tackle the nation’s troubles.

The last sentence is where the Democratic Party and President Obama have dropped the ball. To ease reservations what is needed is leadership, especially a leader who can ease those reservations. And I think, thus far, that has been Obama’s greatest failure. FDR with his fireside chats, and his legislative agenda, was able to ease the reservations of the public, give them hope for the future, and move the country forward.

We live in a much different time where 30 years of framing keep reality from taking hold.  NY Times Paul Krugman does an excellent job today of explaining the disconnect, When Zombies Win.

When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.

How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis — did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?

The answer from the right is that the economic failures of the Obama administration show that big-government policies don’t work. But the response should be, what big-government policies?

For the fact is that the Obama stimulus — which itself was almost 40 percent tax cuts — was far too cautious to turn the economy around. And that’s not 20-20 hindsight: many economists, myself included, warned from the beginning that the plan was grossly inadequate. Put it this way: A policy under which government employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.

Now, maybe it wasn’t possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government. But even if that’s true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics.

Again, the failure of Democrats to offer an alternative to corporate/wealthy trickle down economics, by using the people’s government to help them when they are in dire need, is sapping the people of their hope and optimism for the future.  The people – working and middle class Americans – no longer feel there is anyone (their government included), with any real power, fighting for them and that is why they don’t see much hope or optimism for the future.  That must change, not just to bring back hope and optimism, but our economy and the middle class as we once knew it.

Where we start

From Robert Reich and Bob Edgar, Fixing America’s politics.

So we’re deeply distressed at the dysfunctional state of America’s political culture. We believe that unless our leaders – in both parties – undertake a comprehensive effort to reform our politics, it will be impossible to make lasting progress to revive our economy, rescue the middle class, corral runaway deficits and solve other national problems.

It’s hard, frankly, to see how much can be done when so many leaders in both parties seem so intent on destroying the opposition — whatever the cost. Nonetheless, we suggest these steps as a start:

• Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, should declare their independence from big money in politics, or at least bring that money into the open. That means passing the DISCLOSE Act, requiring groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to reveal the identity of donors to their political activities. Americans need to know who is financing our elections.

• We need to overhaul the way we pay for political campaigns so that candidates and elected officials spend less time courting donors and more time listening to voters. Candidates should be able to run for office on a blend of small donations and limited public funds.

• Public officials must open themselves and their work to independent scrutiny. It’s long past time to strengthen the federal Freedom of Information Act and make government more open. President Barack Obama set an example by posting online details of stimulus spending. The House’s new Republican majority should follow his lead by strengthening, not closing, the independent Office of Congressional Ethics. Senators should create a similar independent body to investigate ethics cases in their chamber.

• The Senate should overhaul its filibuster rule, taking care to protect the minority’s right to be heard but removing its ability to hold the majority hostage.

In 2006, angry voters shifted control of Congress from Republicans to Democrats. This year, angry voters restored Republicans to power in the House but kept Democrats – albeit by a narrower margin – in charge in the Senate.

Between these congressional contests, Obama was elected president. We believe his victory was largely due to his message of hope — a hope that he could break the cycle of dysfunction. But the Nov. 2 “shellacking” reflects a sense among voters that he has become part of the problem.

Beyond that, the dramatic swings of the last three elections reflect the public’s concern that our politicians can’t fix the nation’s problems until they fix their own.

It’s hard to argue with the premise that we likely won’t clean up, or fix, our politics in this country until we have a system in place that will elect clean politicians. Meaning politicians who are accountable to the people how vote for them and not the corporations that fund their campaigns now. It’s also extremely unlikely that those elected by this system will do anything to change it, unless the people make them.

Who is going to fight for the middle class?

There really only seems one member of the US Senate willing to do this. What (Sen.) Bernie (Sanders) Said on Friday drives that home. This article by Katrina vanden Heuvel, to me, shows Obama’s main fault so far.

There is no question, in a political system warped and broken by corporate money and lobbyists, that a president intent on achieving “victories for the American people,” as he described them, would require a sense of pragmatism, and a willingness to accept the compromises that, at times, will flow from it.

But too often, this president is so singularly focused on seeking common ground that he fails to define his – and our – principles. The tax cut deal is just the most recent example. Obama began those negotiations telegraphing his endgame, with eyes set unwaveringly on resolution. He chose not to passionately articulate his values, or to define the GOP’s, and in the aftermath of the battle, he refused to explain where it’s all meant to lead us.

This, he might conclude, is a minor complaint from a dismissible left. But the truth is, without a president who is able – and willing to – lay out a clear, strong and principled argument, without a president who will stand up for the ideals he ran on, even as he seeks resolution, the progressive worldview becomes muted, and the conservative worldview validated.

Obama has reinforced the notion, not by compromise but by relative silence, that we should fear changing tax rates in a time of economic crisis, even when economists of all stripes tell us that tax cuts for the wealthy offer extraordinary cost and zero benefit to the nation. He speaks most passionately not while lambasting a Republican Party that would drown the middle class on behalf of the wealthy, but when criticizing the left for not offering support at a time when he doesn’t deserve it. Because he rightly expects the worst from the far right, he seems to have lost his sense of outrage toward them. The left, in turn, receives his overcharged and misplaced anger – suggesting an equivalence between the two when, in truth, there is none.

He wants to go straight to the compromise without even having the fight. He doesn’t seem to understand that his enemies – the GOP – will just ask for more. The fight is a must and without it the middle class will continue to suffer. This from Peter S. Goodman at the HuffPo, Middle Class Left Out of Conversation.

Oh, to live in Washington, where the annoyances of external reality are so conveniently ignored and The Conversation can be changed like an un-liked song on the national iPod.

Was it not just a couple of weeks ago that The Conversation was all about the supposed five-alarm emergency of the federal budget deficit and the hellish consequences that surely awaited the continuation of profligate spending? Never mind. The political establishment decided to tack another $900 billion on the federal tab to stave off an apparently more dire crisis: the prospect that tax cuts lavished on people wealthy enough to worry about mooring charges might soon expire.

Now, the only talk that seems capable of sustaining the Conversation is whether tax cuts for the richest will be extended again two years forward, and how this will play for those determined to become President.

How can we generate quality jobs by the million and prevent more homeowners from sliding into foreclosure? How can we arrest the long-running breakdown in American middle class life? These are fragments of a narrative long since discarded as politically infertile. They no longer fit into the format of the Sunday talk shows, where the only real question is who won the week, because no one is even trying to win on these points. Not this week. Not any week. The unemployment rate remains snagged at nearly 10 percent and 6.3 million people have been officially out of work for six months and longer, but the Conversation has moved on.

If only the topic of discussion could be so easily be dispatched around the dining room tables of ordinary Americans (an institution increasingly dependent on food stamps). There, the conversation seems stuck on the puzzle of the age: How to get by with less. How to pretend that, despite all indications to the contrary, better days lie ahead, because that’s how things are supposed to go in the movie version of this land of limitless opportunity.

He then goes on the reference this report from the Economic Security Institute, Standing on Shaky Ground, which is about, “How Americans perceive and experience economic insecurity”. It’s as if Washington is a whole different planet from that of the middle class and poor Americans. More from Goodman.

And yet, despite the conspicuous evidence that large numbers of people are still ensnared by this recession, despite the abundance of signs that the last quarter-century has proven cruelly inadequate for people accustomed to living on what they can earn, The Conversation in Washington is surreally divorced from this reality. President Obama and his advisers insist they had to accept the extension of tax cuts for the wealthiest — a primary source of the aggravated inequality that has afflicted the economy — in order to get some relief. This was the cost of extending emergency unemployment benefits for people who have reached the limit. This was the cost of lowering payroll taxes in a bid to spur jobs.

But none of that addresses the long-term vibrancy of the economy. None of that amounts to a viable plan to help nurture new industries and provoke serious job growth. That will take money and time and political fight. It will require a sustained effort and a willingness to take on the enemies of change in Washington — a bipartisan interest group that seems to hold the votes on everything. And there is no sign of that today, alas.

It is as if the mode of thinking on Wall Street — where prosperity is measured in incremental movements in share prices — has so saturated the Congress and the Obama administration that an unemployment epidemic and a foreclosure crisis is, as they say, already priced into the market. It has been accepted as the new baseline of the political discussion, a facet of life so taken for granted that it is hardly even worth discussing.

If the findings in the paper released this day were new, they would surely inspire immediate action. If terrorists were planning a plot that could, in one cataclysm, visit such damage on American households as has been collectively absorbed in recent years, whole arms of the government would now be in full crisis mode. Instead, the chattering class goes on, picking over the electoral implications of one tax scheme or another. The Conversation is a small-minded, dispiriting drone.

“There’s planet earth and there’s planet Washington,” says Yale University political scientist Jacob S. Hacker, the study’s lead author. “The telescopes on planet Washington seem not powerful enough to reach to planet earth.”

It’s down right despicable that this is going on in the “Good ‘ol U S of A”!! It’s getting harder by the day to understand why no one with political power in this country is even trying to set out a long-term agenda to fix this problem. Looks like Naomi Klein had this nailed.  We, the middle class, really needed Obama and the Democrats to work for us.  As someone recently said, we will have to be the change we want to see in the world.  Now we’ve got to start over again.  We should use Bernie’s speech from Friday as our guide.

Galbraith & Lakoff – two must reads

James K. Galbraith, Whose Side Is the White House On?

We’ve learned from Vic Fingerhut and Mike Lux that the administration went down in public esteem when people realized it was working for the banks and not for them. Why did they think this? Why did they go from “blaming Bush and Wall Street to blaming Obama and Wall Street”? Because plainly they could see what was in front of their faces. Except in manner, President Bush never really pretended to be a President for ordinary folks; President Obama did. Bush was who he was; Obama held out, fostered, and promoted vast hopes, mobilizing the American population behind his leadership on that basis. And he disappointed those hopes — to use a very harsh word, one could say he has betrayed those hopes. How can one therefore blame the voters for acting as they have acted?

What happens next? Let’s again not kid ourselves, we have lost a great many seats in the House of Representatives and the House of Representatives isn’t coming back into a Democratic majority in the near future. Simply because of the balance of exposures — the larger numbers of Democratic Senators exposed to reelection in the next cycle, the greatest likelihood is that the Senate will also go Republican in two years time. President Obama has set his course. He has surrounded himself with the advisers of his choice and as he moves to replace President Summers we hear from the press that the priority is to “repair the rift with his investors on Wall Street.” What does that tell you? It tells me that he does not have President Clinton’s fighting and survival instincts. I’ve not heard one good reason all day to believe that we are going to see from this White House the fight that we want, that he could win in two years, or any reason we should be backing him now.

The Democratic Party has become too associated with Wall Street. This is a fact. It is a structural problem. It seems to me that we as progressives need — this is my personal position — we need to draw a line and decide that we would be better off with an under-funded, fighting progressive minority party than a party marked by obvious duplicity and constant losses on every policy front as a result of the reversals in our own leadership.

What is at stake in the long run? Two things, mainly, in my view. First, it seems to me that we as progressives need to make an honorable defense of the great legacies of the New Deal and Great Society — programs and institutions that brought America out of the Great Depression and bought us through the Second World War, brought us to our period of greatest prosperity, and the greatest advances in social justice. Social Security, Medicare, housing finance — the front-line right now is the foreclosure crisis, the crisis, I should say, of foreclosure fraud — the progressive tax code, anti-poverty policy, public investment, public safety, and human and civil rights. We are going to lose these battles– get used to it. But we need to make an honorable fight, to state clearly what our principles are and to lay down a record which is trustworthy for the future.

That dovetails perfectly with what George Lakoff recently wrote, Untellable Truths.

Democrats need to unite behind a simple set of moral principles and to create an effective language to express them. President Obama in his campaign expressed those principles simply, as the basis of American democracy. (1) Empathy — Americans care about each other. (2) Responsibility, both personal and social. We have to act on that care. (3) The ethic of excellence. We have to make ourselves better so we can make our families, our communities, our country and the world better. Government has special missions: to protect and empower our citizens to have at least the necessities. I don’t know any Democrats who don’t believe in these principles. They need to be said out loud and repeated over and over.

[...]

If there is a teachable communication moment for President Obama, this is it. Bring back “empathy” — “the most important thing my mother taught me.” Speak of “empathy” for “people who are hurting.” Say again how empathy is basis of democracy (“caring for your fellow citizens”), how we have a responsibility to act on that empathy: social as well as personal responsibility. Bring the central role of empathy in democracy to the media. And make it clear that personal responsibility alone is anti-patriotic, the opposite of what America is fundamentally about. That is the first step in telling our most important untellable truths. And it is a necessary step in loosening the conservative grip on public discourse.

For videos of the president speaking about empathy, Google: Obama Empathy Youtube, and Obama Empathy Speeches.

That’s the case. Over the last two years Obama and the majority or elected Democrats have done little, if anything, to show empathy and support for those who are hurting economically in this country, by pushing a broad-based plan for an economic resurgent. In other words a these two men have stated, they should have shown empathy for the American people instead of the banksters. If they had, we would all be in a much better place today.