Twilight of the Rubes–Frank Rich on Obama’s Original Sin: “The president’s failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second.”
I suppose that’s what Rich meant in 2007 when he described Obama as an apostle of “a unified, live-and-let-live democracy”. But I can’t help to wonder why he sounds so outraged and surprised. Maybe Rich also failed to notice all the Wall Street money Obama raised around that time. And then there’s the matter of those AIG bonuses.
Plus this from Matt Taibbi: “Rich’s thesis is that this issue is becoming important not just to reporters, but to voters, and that Obama may soon pay for his failures at the polls.“ Taibbi, I think, is only partly right. I’d bet good money that voters found this issue important some time ago. But when he writes that the issue is just becoming important to reporters, I think he is correct.
Implicit in Taibbi’s words is also another point worth noting: that reporters were aware of the issue, but they just didn’t think it was important; and thus they didn’t write about it. Now that Obama’s re-elections prospects look grim, now it’s a problem. Hope and Change don’t quite spring eternal, I suppose . . .
Crossposted at The Rhetorican.
Rocketman on July 9, 2011 at 3:32 am said:
A reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down? Who’s Rich talking about? Soros? Dodd? Barney Frank? Seriously, I would have thought a former theater critic would have reconginzed such literary irony and hackneyed melodrama to be non-starters.
But then again, no one ever said he was a good theater critic…