"Ryan...has "dressed up trickle-down economics and wrapped it in an Ayn Rand novel."
Sherrod Brown's Lessons for Obama
By E.J. Dionne - October 11, 2012
snip//
Indeed, his analysis of why Democrats were routed in 2010 combines a clear-eyed view of the condition of the country at the time -- "There was no evidence by the 2010 elections that things were getting better" -- with a belief that his party must always be prepared to make its case. Leading into 2010, he said, "we let them get away with too much."
That's not a bad description of how Democrats felt about Obama's first debate with Mitt Romney. It's also why their expectations of Vice President Biden in Thursday's encounter with Rep. Paul Ryan are so high. Democrats want Biden to put their side back on offense, and Brown's view of the argument Biden has to make was characteristic.
Ryan, Brown said, has "dressed up trickle-down economics and wrapped it in an Ayn Rand novel." The vice president, Brown added, should highlight the Republicans' desire to privatize both Medicare and Social Security, reflected in Ryan's own record and Republicans' attempts to do so whenever they thought they had the votes. "It's clear they want to go there," Brown said.
Democrats, including Obama, have to get over that first debate, but it does contain useful lessons that the president learned once and cannot forget again.
Obama began his political recovery after the 2011 debt-ceiling fiasco only when he acknowledged the need to confront the radicalism of the new Republican agenda. He put forward a clear alternative philosophy rooted in government's obligation to check the abuses of the market, to invest in public goods the market won't finance, and to offset growing inequalities.
Both winning the election and governing successfully require Obama to remain unflinching in his insistence that conservatism in its current form cannot provide an adequate basis for either economic renewal or social fairness. Ironically, Romney is unintentionally lending support to this view by trying to abandon his recent right-wing positions with the speed of a NASCAR driver.
more...
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/10/11/sherrod_browns_lessons_for_obama__115741.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
