The Return of "They" as Our "Current Leaders" and Unhelpful Government [Victor Davis Hanson]
It is critical for the Obama campaign to repackage Michelle's message via set-speeches and the avoidance of impromptu theorizing, in which her Ivy-League/Chicago political referents start to reappear — in cascading fashion. Her recent USA Today interview is an improvement, but even here she starts in on the old refrain a bit too much. According to the USA Today interview, "She criticized current leaders for telling Americans that "if your world is fine, don't worry about anyone else." And "She also talked about people who work hard and are grateful, but at some point "have to say 'enough' " to a government that doesn't help."
I don't know any leaders, specially in a campaign season, who ever say "If your world is fine, don't worry about anyone else." All we are hearing this season (and at a time of national indebtedness and a resulting record weak currency), is a sort of bipartisan competition to fund as many initiatives as are imaginable, from health care, energy, and mortgages to education and veterans benefits, to serve the American public.
I don't know anyone who doesn't "worry about anyone else"— not this season of our discontent when we worry about everything from Iran and energy to our national and international debt. With entitlements and debt servicing utilizing about 70 percent of the federal budget, and with 96 percent of GDP going to non-defense expenditures, it's hard to imagine that we have to say "enough" to a tiny government that "doesn't help."
The problem, for the nth time, is not just the liberal traditional call for much bigger government, more taxes on the undeserving wealthy, and more redistributive entitlements for the truly deserving, but the manner in which the give-me agenda is voiced and framed. There is once again the edge that borders on the whiny that somehow a somebody bad out there is doing all these terrible things, whether, as in the USA Today interview, we now define that nebulous bad bogeyman as a "government" that doesn't help or "current leaders" that advocate selfishness.
I have some sympathy for the Obama handlers. Michelle is obviously bright and accomplished (and "feisty" as her husband put it), so it is difficult to politely explain to her that her previous educational and political landscape is not necessarily of advantage in winning key constituencies central to her husband's election. While all would like government money, they want it in Clintonesque bite-the-lip fashion, rather than in the same old/same old, blame-someone- for-not-giving-me-my-due mode.
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