Obama In Rolling Stone

April 25, 2012 — Ron Chusid

Barack Obama is on the cover of Rolling Stone. The interview started out with Obama making a point which I think many Democrats have missed. Obama has been criticized for trying to attract Republicans when it is obvious that Republican politicians have no intention to  compromise. They prefer to block anything proposed by Obama for political gain, regardless of how much harm they do to the country. However, in trying to make his policies attractive to Republicans, it is Republican voters, not politicians, who Obama wants to attract. Many are brainwashed by Fox and the right wing noise machine, but Obama showed in 2008 that he can attract enough former Republican voters to win in states where Democrats had not won recently.

Let’s talk about the campaign. Given all we’ve heard about and learned during the GOP primaries, what’s your take on the state of the Republican Party, and what do you think they stand for?
First of all, I think it’s important to distinguish between Republican politicians and people around the country who consider themselves Republicans. I don’t think there’s been a huge change in the country. If you talk to a lot of Republicans, they’d like to see us balance the budget, but in a balanced way. A lot of them are concerned about jobs and economic growth and favor market-based solutions, but they don’t think we should be getting rid of every regulation on the books. There are a lot of Republican voters out there who are frustrated with Wall Street and think that they acted irresponsibly and should be held to account, so they don’t want to roll back regulations on Wall Street.

But what’s happened, I think, in the Republican caucus in Congress, and what clearly happened with respect to Republican candidates, was a shift to an agenda that is far out of the mainstream – and, in fact, is contrary to a lot of Republican precepts. I said recently that Ronald Reagan couldn’t get through a Republican primary today, and I genuinely think that’s true. You have every candidate onstage during one of the primary debates rejecting a deficit-reduction plan that involved $10 in cuts for every $1 of revenue increases. You have a Republican front-runner who rejects the Dream Act, which would help young people who, through no fault of their own, are undocumented, but who have, for all intents and purposes, been raised as Americans. You’ve got a Republican Congress whose centerpiece, when it comes to economic development, is getting rid of the Environmental Protection Agency.

If you want to lower the deficit, reduce government intrusion in individual’s personal lives, have lower taxes on the middle class, and a stronger defense against al Qaeda, all things I would expect Republican voters to support, Obama has been the one to offer more sensible positions on these issues.

As for Mitt Romney:
Given all that, what do you think the general election is going to look like, and what do you think of Mitt Romney?
I think the general election will be as sharp a contrast between the two parties as we’ve seen in a generation. You have a Republican Party, and a presumptive Republican nominee, that believes in drastically rolling back environmental regulations, that believes in drastically rolling back collective-bargaining rights, that believes in an approach to deficit reduction in which taxes are cut further for the wealthiest Americans, and spending cuts are entirely borne by things like education or basic research or care for the vulnerable. All this will be presumably written into their platform and reflected in their convention. I don’t think that their nominee is going to be able to suddenly say, “Everything I’ve said for the last six months, I didn’t mean.” I’m assuming that he meant it. When you’re running for president, people are paying attention to what you’re saying.
Drug policy is an area where many of us who did vote for Obama were disappointed. He did address this issue:

Let me ask you about the War on Drugs. You vowed in 2008, when you were running for election, that you would not “use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws about medical marijuana.” Yet we just ran a story that shows your administration is launching more raids on medical pot than the Bush administration did. What’s up with that?

Here’s what’s up: What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana – and the reason is, because it’s against federal law. I can’t nullify congressional law. I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, “Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books.” What I can say is, “Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage.” As a consequence, there haven’t been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes.

The only tension that’s come up – and this gets hyped up a lot – is a murky area where you have large-scale, commercial operations that may supply medical marijuana users, but in some cases may also be supplying recreational users. In that situation, we put the Justice Department in a very difficult place if we’re telling them, “This is supposed to be against the law, but we want you to turn the other way.” That’s not something we’re going to do. I do think it’s important and useful to have a broader debate about our drug laws. One of the things we’ve done over the past three years was to make a sensible change when it came to the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. We’ve had a discussion about how to focus on treatment, taking a public-health approach to drugs and lessening the overwhelming emphasis on criminal laws as a tool to deal with this issue. I think that’s an appropriate debate that we should have.

Changing the legislation is important, and I do wish Obama would propose some meaningful changes. There is no doubt that the medical marijuana laws are used for people to obtain marijuana for uses beyond medical uses. On the other hand, it is clear that prohibition does not work and there is no point in using government to try to prevent the use of marijuana. I back the position of the California Medical Association in having doubts about the system for medical marijuana but believe the answer is to legalized marijuana and get government out of this issue.
Obama showed his support for the free market, while contrasting his views of a market economy from those of the Republicans:

Occupy Wall Street seems to have influenced your rhetoric. Has it had a deeper impact on your thinking about America?

You know, I think that Occupy Wall Street was just one vivid expression of a broader anxiety that has been around in the United States for at least a decade or more. People have a sense the game is rigged, so just a few people can do well, and everybody else is left to scramble to get by.

The free market is the greatest generator of wealth in history. I’m a firm believer in the free market, and the capacity of Americans to start a business, pursue their dreams and strike it rich. But when you look at the history of how we became an economic superpower, that rugged individualism and private-sector dynamism was always coupled with government creating a platform so that everybody could succeed, so that consumers weren’t taken advantage of, so that the byproducts of capitalism, like pollution or worker injuries, were regulated. Creating that social safety net has not made us weaker – it’s made us stronger. It liberated people to say, “I can move to another state, but if I don’t find a job right away, my kids aren’t going to go hungry. I can start a business, but if it doesn’t work out, I’m going to be able to land on my feet.” Making those kinds of commitments to each other – to create safety nets, to invest in infrastructure and schools and basic research – is just like our collective investment in national security or fire departments or police. It has facilitated the kind of risk-taking that has made our economy so dynamic. This is what it means for us to live in a thriving, modern democracy.

One of the major arguments we’ll be having in this election season is a contrasting vision that says not just that government is part of the problem, but essentially that government is the entire problem. These guys, they don’t just want to roll back the New Deal – in some cases, they want to go back even further.

Obama also reads some of the blogs as well as op-ed writers:

Do you read Paul Krugman?I read all of the New York Times columnists. Krugman’s obviously one of the smartest economic reporters out there, but I also read some of the conservative columnists, just to get a sense of where those arguments are going. There are a handful of blogs, Andrew Sullivan’s on the Daily Beast being an example, that combine thoughtful analysis with a sampling of lots of essays that are out there. The New Yorker and The Atlantic still do terrific work. Every once in a while, I sneak in a novel or a nonfiction book.

There’s far more in the full text of the interview.
Posted in Barack Obama, Blogs & Social Media, Drug Policy, Economy, Mitt Romney, Republicans. Tags: , , , , , . 7 Comments »

Video Of President Obama’s Speech Presenting the American Jobs Act

September 9, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Video above. Text and my comments on the speech were in the previous post. It must have been a good speech if Paul Krugman liked it, despite thinking Obama should have gone further.

Posted in Barack Obama, Congress, Economy. Tags: , . 3 Comments »

Response To The Political Fantasy World Of The Extremes

September 5, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Leftist criticism of Obama has been a hot topic in the blogosphere this holiday weekend, including a number of rather illogical responses to Jonathan Chait’s article in the New York Times Magazine which I discussed here. One of the most absurd posts came from Matt Stoller at Salon, suggesting a primary challenge to Obama from the left, even at the cost of losing the general election.

Stoller’s view of politics and history was just too absurd for most people to spend their holiday weekend responding, but James Joyner wound up doing so, making it unnecessary for the rest of us. Joyner appears to see through the fantasies common on the extremes of both ends of the political spectrum. Although he responds from the right, his discussion was based upon a common sense and understanding of basic politics which transcends any ideological differences.

In addition to responding to Stoller’s post, Joyner  had comments relevant to the disagreement with Blue Texan in the comments to the previous post. While I thought it was worth mentioning that liberal economists were arguing for a larger stimulus, this was not by any means a mainstream idea at the time and the chances of passing a larger stimulus were extremely remote. Joyner’s recollection of the politics of the time is much more like that of myself and Jonathan Chait (emphasis mine):

FDL’s Blue Texan points out that several liberal economics luminaries–Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, Brad DeLong, and others–argued for a much larger stimulus. But passing the $787 billion version required the Democrats to go to the mats, barely peeling off enough Republican votes to avoid a Senate filibuster. And doing that fired up the Tea Party and directly led to the historic 2010 thumping that Stoller blames on Obama being insufficiently progressive.

Krugman and I were on the same side of the bank bailout issue and for similar reasons. But we were extreme outliers. Most economists were warning of dire consequences if we allowed the banks to collapse. As it was, the Bush administration’s decision to  let Lehman Brothers go under is cited by many as ground zero in the global financial collapse.

Similarly, Krugman and I were outliers on the stimulus, with him arguing for one wildly larger than there was political support for and me arguing for a much smaller one targeted at those who lost their jobs and houses because of the meltdown. Frankly, either of those would likely have been better than the expensive but futile mishmash we got. But nobody made either of us king and we therefore got to live with the political realities rather than our fantasy world.

By any reasonable standpoint, Obama has been a fairly centrist president. One can make the case that his “lead from behind” style has made him a weak president but one can also make the opposite case–that he’s passed a massive stimulus, a historic reorganization of the health care system, and took us to a war that had very little political support through working the system from behind the scenes.

Pointing out that Obama has been a centrist will not endear him to portions of the left-blogosphere who are foolish enough to believe that someone to the left of Obama would have a chance of winning, or that any president would really have had the ability to have pursued an even more liberal course. I also pointed out the many liberal successes of the Obama presidency (see here and here), which some on the far left choose to ignore. A view of the alternative can be seen here.

Posted in Barack Obama, Blogs & Social Media, Economy. Tags: , . 4 Comments »

The Anti-Science Party

August 29, 2011 — Ron Chusid

I’ve disagreed with some of Paul Krugman’s writings when he as discussed politics recently, but he is certainly correct with this warning:

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

This comes at the end of a column which primarily deals with Republicans who deny climate change, pointing out that “the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.”

Krugman targetted not only Rick Perry, but Mitt Romney who has been running away from the issue out of political expediency:

According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So, yes, Krugman’s warning is valid. There is an excellent chance that the Republican nominee in any given year will be anti-science. In a two party system, there is a high probability that sooner or later the Republican nominee will be elected.

Posted in Environment, Evolution, Mitt Romney, Op-eds, Republicans, Rick Perry, Science. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »

Liberal Response To The Attacks On Obama From The Left

August 8, 2011 — Ron Chusid

I don’t agree with Obama on everything and there is certainly plenty of room to criticize Barack Obama from the left, but I frequently wonder whether some of his critics from the left are paying any attention to what he is actually saying or dong. There was a lot of excitement from some segments of the left  over the weekend from this op-ed by Drew Weston. Weston’s op-ed had two critical flaws.  First, he concentrated on Obama’s rhetoric rather than his actual actions.  Second, while his criticism was based upon things he argues Obama should have said, quite frequently Obama has actually said very similar things. Andrew Spung pointed out numerous examples. In seeing that Weston was unaware of so many of Obama’s public statements,  Steve Benen speculates that “Maybe the professor missed those speeches; maybe he didn’t check.”

There might be room for improvement in the manner by which Obama gets his message out, but we must also keep in mind the obstacles he faces from Fox, right wing talk radio, and conservative dominance over much of the mainstream media. Obama’s position as president and his strategy of pushing to move beyond partisan gridlock limits his ability to engage in harsher rhetoric which some on the left expect. This role is better filled by supporters on the left who do not have the constraints which Obama has.  It would be far more effective if leftists such as Weston and Paul Krugman used their energy to make the liberal case for Obama’s policies, and point out those liberal statements which Weston ignored, rather than making specious attacks. Instead they sometimes even utilize remarkable mental gymnastics to argue that Obama is as conservative as George Bush.

Weston, and many Obama critics from the left, fail to recognize the difference between the president and other political leaders. The president, who must govern within the realities of what is politically achievable, cannot be as dogmatic about  principle as a Senator on one of the extremes of his party. Liberals with buyer’s remorse fail to recognize that any other president would be limited by similar constraints as Obama.As Jonathan Chait wrote:

Westen’s op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.

Westen locates Obama’s inexplicable failure to properly use his storytelling power in some deep-rooted aversion to conflict. He fails to explain why every president of the postwar era has compromised, reversed, or endured the total failure of his domestic agenda. Yes, even George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan infuriated their supporters by routinely watering down their agenda or supporting legislation utterly betraying them, and making rhetorical concessions to the opposition. (Ronald Reagan boasted of increasing agriculture subsidies and called for making the rich pay “their fair share” as part of a tax reform that did in fact increase the tax burden on the rich; Bill Clinton said “the era of big government is over” and ended welfare as an entitlement; etc., etc.)

Chait proceeded to note multiple factual errors in Weston’s attack.  Others disagreeing with Weston, such as Kevin Drum, point out that Obama does have a compelling story–even if not the exact story which they want told:

The problem isn’t that Obama didn’t have a story. He did, and he told it pretty well. His story was one about the dysfunctional partisanship destroying Washington and how to move beyond it. You might not like that story, but it was there. And while it obviously didn’t succeed in moving the needle on partisanship, it did allow Obama to produce a pretty decent set of legislative achievements. As much as two years of anti-conservative stemwinders would have thrilled me, I doubt they would have produced anywhere near as much.

Andrew Sullivan further described the differences between Obama’s approach and those who desire a more confrontational approach:

What Westen seems to have wanted was the Democratic version of George W. Bush, contemptuous of his opponents, ruthless in his often unconstitutional determination to get his agenda through, divisive and polarizing. But Obama would not have won election on those grounds and did not have a mandate for that. He was elected as a moderate Democrat, prepared to engage any pragmatic solution to obvious problems, while not splitting an already polarized country even further.

That he has tried to do, against an opposition party that decided to double down on polarization, on politics as warfare, on politics as a game, and bereft of any ideas except taking us back to before the New Deal. What has to be defeated is not just their agenda, but their modus operandi. Only by patiently out-lasting and out-arguing them will Obama be able to do this. And it says a lot about the utopian left that they do not see the wisdom and responsibility of this strategy.

It is unprovable whether a more confrontational approach would have achieved more, but I doubt it. Some on the left think that Obama would be more effective if he utilized the same strategies which we protested when used by George Bush. Perhaps, but the cessation of such conduct is an important reason why I voted for Barack Obama.

Posted in Blogs & Social Media, Economy, George Bush. Tags: , , , , . 10 Comments »

Increasing Age For Medicare Eligibility Is A Terrible Idea

July 23, 2011 — Ron Chusid

I’ve noted my distaste for Paul Krugman’s often hysterical attacks on Barack Obama many times in the past, including as recently as yesterday. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t areas where I agree with Krugman and disagree with Obama. One of these was the topic of a blog post today. I totally agree with Krugman that raising the Medicare eligibly age is a terrible idea under our current health care system.

One of the biggest problems with the current system is that people with pre-existing medical conditions have difficulty obtaining private health insurance. As the risk of pre-existing medical conditions increases with age, the individual insurance market does a terrible job of providing an affordable product. During the efforts to pass health care reform, I was actually more interested in the  short-lived effort to offer a Medicare buy-in for those under 65 as opposed to the already watered-down public option.

If we had a working health care system as envisioned by Obama in place, then it might be all right to increase the Medicare eligibility age. However, the Republicans are now doing everything they can to undermine this system. Until we have  a system in place that ensures that people in their 60′s can obtain affordable health care, increasing the Medicare eligibility age should be off the table. Actually, at the moment, I still don’t think that lowering this age would be a bad idea.

Posted in Barack Obama, Blogs & Social Media, Health Care, Op-eds. Tags: , , , , . No Comments »

Paul Krugman Again Shows He Is Out Of Touch With Reality In His Hatred Of Obama

July 22, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Paul Krugman, who has never moved beyond the Obama-Clinton primary battle, will never miss a chance  to paint Barack Obama as a right-winger. He was given another opportunity to repeat his usual nonsense in response to Bruce Bartlett writing a poorly-reasoned post entitled Barack Obama: The Democrats’ Richard Nixon? Krugman ignores all the fallacies in Bartlett’s post because it goes along with his visceral and irrational hatred of Barack Obama.

Bartlett based his argument on these claims:

  • His stimulus bill was half the size that his advisers thought necessary;
  • He continued Bush’s war and national security policies without change and even retained Bush’s defense secretary;
  • He put forward a health plan almost identical to those that had been supported by Republicans such as Mitt Romney in the recent past, pointedly rejecting the single-payer option favored by liberals;
  • He caved to conservative demands that the Bush tax cuts be extended without getting any quid pro quo whatsoever;
  • And in the past few weeks he has supported deficit reductions that go far beyond those offered by Republicans.

While these do show that Obama is a moderate economically, this does not come close to showing that Obama is to the right of Nixon as Krugman claims. His stimulus bill was less than what many on the left wanted, but it was tremendously more than those on the right (as well as many in the middle) would tolerate. While Nixon further  escalated the Viet Nam war, Obama has been working towards disengaging from Bush’s wars (even if more slowly than many of us would prefer). His health care plan was similar to Romney’s, but was also to the left of  the plans advocated by any of the Democratic candidates just four years before he was elected. The health care battle showed that anything more liberal than his plan would have no chance of passing in Congress.

Obama compromised on the extension of the Bush tax cuts in a deal which, among other things, provided an extension of long term unemployment benefits. Krugman should know that the claim of not getting any quid pro quo whatsoever is totally false. Similarly the last claim is also untrue, with many Republicans pushing for far more reductions in spending than Obama is agreeing to. In addition, Obama has pointed out the necessity of getting our fiscal house in order for progressives who want to be able to finance their plans in the future.

Bartlett also cherry-picked certain items, ignoring many all the social issues where Nixon was far to the right of Obama. Nixon promoted the culture war which led to the growth of the religious right, while Obama promotes a liberal social view which is in complete contrast to the Nixon years. Obama has been promoting the rule of law, while Nixon attempted to circumvent the electoral process in what came close to being an attempted  a coup d’état. 

There is one point where I partially  agree with Krugman:

Obama gets no credit for his moderation, and never will. No matter how far right he moves, Republicans will move further right; and nothing he can do will keep them from denouncing him as a radical socialist.

It is true that Republicans will call Obama, as well as any other Democrat in the White House, a socialist. What  Krugman misses is that Obama’s goal is not to be accepted as a conservative Republican (even if Krugman is deluded into thinking this is what he is). Obama’s goal is that he will receive credit for his moderation from the same coalition, including the independents, which elected him in 2008. I know that this is frustrating to those on the far left, and there are many areas where I disagree with Obama, but this is far preferable to a true right wing Republican.

Posted in Barack Obama, Blogs & Social Media. Tags: , , . 9 Comments »

Paul Krugman is Half Right On Medicare

June 4, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Republicans are promoting a plan which would destroy Medicare, claiming that Medicare cannot survive in its present form. Paul Krugman argues that Medicare is sustainable:

I keep seeing people say that Medicare in its current form is not sustainable, as if that were an established fact. It’s anything but.What is Medicare? It’s single-payer coverage for the elderly. Other countries have single-payer systems that are much cheaper than ours — and also much cheaper than private insurance in America. So there’s nothing about the form that makes Medicare unsustainable, unless you think that health care itself is unsustainable.

What is true is that the U.S. Medicare is expensive compared with, say, Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) or the French health care system (which is complicated, but largely single-payer in its essentials); that’s because Medicare American-style is very open-ended, reluctant to say no to paying for medically dubious procedures, and also fails to make use of its pricing power over drugs and other items.

So Medicare will have to start saying no; it will have to provide incentives to move away from fee for service, and so on and so forth. But such changes would not mean a fundamental change in the way Medicare works.

Of course, what the people who say things like “Medicare is unsustainable” usually mean is that it must be privatized, converted into a voucher system, whatever. The thing is, none of those changes would make the system more efficient — on the contrary.

So this business about Medicare in its present form being unsustainable sounds wise but is actually a stupid slogan. The solution to the future of Medicare is Medicare — smarter, less open-ended, but recognizably the same program.

Krugman is right that Medicare is sustainable. Changes will be necessary to account for demographic  changes in an aging society, and to account for increasingly expensive technology. He is wrong in concentrating on fee for service as the main problem. After all, the current fee for service Medicare system is far more cost effective than private insurance is. Krugman is also wrong  in saying that eliminating fee for service “would not mean a fundamental change in the way Medicare works.”

Private insurance tried to eliminate fee for service. The HMO era was a disaster, trying to save money by giving incentives not to provide medical care. Those who have gone through this in the past while working are unlikely to see this as desirable for their future years when they qualify for Medicare.

Adjustments certainly need to be made to Medicare, including adjustments to what services are  paid for and how they are paid under a fee for service system. Some modifications which are currently being experimented with may also be of value, such as partially paying based upon performance or for providing the services of a Medical Home, might turn out to be worthwhile modifications. However, any successful system which provides for the needs and desires of individual patients will need to include a strong fee for service component.

Posted in Health Care. Tags: , , . 5 Comments »

What Planet Is Paul Krugman On?

January 23, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Has anyone told Paul Krugman that the 2008 primary is over? Maybe he is trying out for a job a Fox, showing he can distort Obama’s policies just as much as the Republicans do. Investing in our infrastructure to create jobs and become more competitive with other countries is hardly the evil plan that Krugman makes it out to be. This includes absurd attacks on  his blog as well as on This Week this morning. Krugman’s characterization of Obama’s position is no more about what Obama is really saying than Republican attacks on health care reform reflected Obama’s policy. It’s not like Obama is advocating anything the Republicans are actually supporting as they are vowing to oppose his economic proposals.

I am also getting rather sick of the way that Krugman (and many of his supporters) characterize any disagreement with him as moving to the right, as if this by itself is sufficient to disqualify any idea from consideration. Sure, more often than not a conservative idea these days is a bad idea, but one really must demonstrate this about a specific idea before attacking someone.

Of course Krugman is rather inconsistent in this. On the one hand he has never stopped attacking Obama for bringing up Ronald Reagan, even if it was simply in the sense of acknowledging his place in history while expressing disagreement with his policies. On the other hand, Krugman had no problem during the primary campaign when he advocated the Republican policy of an individual mandate to purchase health insurance while Obama opposed this. (At least Krugman is in no position to attack Obama for making the mistake of later accepting the old GOP position on this issue).

We can at least be confident that Barack Obama is not losing any sleep over Krugman’s ridiculous attacks as he watches his position improve in the polls.

Update: Krugman practices the same type of distortion in his New York Times column.

Posted in Barack Obama, Blogs & Social Media, Economy, Health Care, Op-eds, Ronald Reagan. Tags: , , , . 4 Comments »

Once Again Paul Krugman Shows The Left Can Be As Nutty As The Right

November 21, 2010 — Ron Chusid

I really don’t take the repeated attempts by Paul Krugman to paint Obama as a Reagan-loving conservative any more seriously than the attempts by tea party supporters to pain Obama as a socialist.

Krugman’s post is another pathetic attempt to resurrect the Obama vs. Clinton campaign long after Hillary Clinton has joined forces with Obama. During the 2008 primary campaign, this Clint0n-supporter did not understand the political benefits of finding some good to mention regarding Reagan’s legacy to woo the Reagan Democrats back to voting Democratic, while also making clear his vast differences in opinion with Reagan. Krugman still does not understand Obama. I imagine he is helping to keep up his readership among the PUMA’s.

Posted in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Op-eds, Ronald Reagan. Tags: , , , . 8 Comments »
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