Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Perry picks up pitchfork, joins class warfare fight
Georgia Logothetis for Daily Kos Tue Sep 27, 2011
With more and more pundits asking whether Rick Perry has fizzled out, and with so many in the establishment defending the notion that a class war has already been taking place, it's not surprising that Perry's trying to jump onboard the middle class bandwagon:
JEFFERSON, Iowa — Call it a personal class war: Texas Gov. Rick Perry is trying to draw sharp class lines with his chief GOP presidential rival, the well-heeled former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
“As the son of tenant farmers, I can promise you I wasn’t born with four aces in my hand,” Perry recently told about 200 central Iowa GOP activists. He grinned and then paused to allow chuckles to roll through the audience as the message became clear: Perry was a product of humble beginnings — ordinary folk like them — while Romney came from privilege. [...]
In Iowa and elsewhere, Perry has started linking himself to the middle class, if not to low-income Americans, and tying Romney to the nation’s upper echelon. His larger strategy is to paint Romney as a pre-packaged politician out of step with everyday Americans, plant suggestions with Republicans feeling the pinch of tough economic times that Romney doesn’t understand their plight, and undermine Romney’s attempts to connect with middle-class voters.
Meanwhile, Herman Cain calls President Obama's "it's not class warfare, it's math" argument "bull----":
“Can I be blunt? That’s a lie,” Cain said, before the sound of his voice began to rise noticeably higher. “You’re not supposed to call the president a liar. Well if you’re not supposed to call the president a liar, he shouldn’t tell a lie. If it’s not class warfare, it’s highway robbery. He wants us to believe it’s not class warfare, oh okay, it’s not class warfare. Pick my pockets, because that’s what he’s doing!”
Cain paused, took a breath and looked at me.
“I’m not mad at you, I just get passionate about this stuff,” he said. “I have to tell people because I get so worked up. . . . I’m listening to all this bull__ that he’s talking about, ‘fairness’ and ‘balanced approach’ to get this economy going.”
From the reaction from voters and pundits alike, it looks like President Obama's populist strategy is less "bull----" and more "brilliant." Greg Sargeant looks at the political upside:
All this aside, the arguments from Warren and Obama — and the conservative responses to them — suggest that it’s a good thing that we’re having this argument. It’s one that’s all about priorities and basic fairness. It may be, as Kevin Drum has argued, that taxes aren’t necessarily the political winner for Dems that polls suggest. But even so, this isn’t a bad place for Democrats to be. In contrast to months of fighting it out on austerity/spending cut turf favorable to the GOP, Dems are now arguing for fairer taxation, in order to reduce the deficit, on the grounds that we’re all in this together. Meanwhile, Republicans are fighting to defend low taxes on the rich even as they decry “class warfare,” which gives Dems an opening to ask who, exactly, Republicans are fighting for.
Whatever the political benefits of this argument for Dems, it’s a good one for the country to hear.
Bob Franken also chimes in on the issue:
There is a growing realization that the real class warfare in this country is that being waged by the wealthiest against everyone else.
Study after study reveals the ugly growing chasm between haves and have nots. It's reflected in the Census Bureau report that shows one in six Americans, 15 percent, in 2010, lived below the poverty line at the bottom of the ladder, while the top 5 percent control 60 percent of America's wealth. Up until now, Obama has been frittering away these arguments as he clung to the naivete of compromise and give-and-take with an opposition that was only about take.
The President's new found populism echoes Warren Buffett. [...] Following in his footsteps could mean Obama is marching on solid ground. A USA Today-Gallup poll released just after the jobs speech found a 2-to-1 majority favoring increasing taxes on the rich. So the "class warfare" chant might be finally recognized as the empty demagoguery it is. Besides, this is a political war where until now the tea party hordes have been romping around Washington. Now Obama has decided to engage the crusaders, replacing accommodation with confrontation.
Speaking of class warfare, James Werrell explains what its effects look like:
America now has more poor people than at any time in the 52 years records have been kept, according to an article in Time magazine by economist Rana Foroohar. The number of people living below the poverty line - a family of four living on $22,000 a year - has been rising for the past four years and now stands at 15 percent of the population.
Foroohar asserts that the American Dream, the notion that anyone with grit and determination can improve his or her status, has become a sad joke. Americans now are less upwardly mobile than many European nations, including even stratified countries such as England, France and Germany.
If you're born poor in America, you're likely to stay poor. [...]
The fact is, trickle-down is a cruel hoax.
It's the failure of trickle-down economics that prompted a wealthy ex-Google exec to plead with President Obama to raise taxes on the rich during a town hall yesterday:
At the “Putting America Back to Work” LinkedIn town hall in Mountain View, Calif., Obama came face-to-face with his deficit-reduction proposal. “Would you please raise my taxes?” asked Doug Edwards a former director of consumer marketing and branding at Google, who described himself as “unemployed by choice.”
“I would like very much to have the country to continue to invest in things like Pell grants and infrastructure and job training programs that made it possible for me to get to where I am,” Edwards said. “And it kills me to see Congress not supporting the expiration of the tax cuts that have been benefitting so many of us for so long. I think that needs to change, and I hope that you’ll stay strong in doing that.”
The question set up the president to explain why he thinks it’s necessary to reform the tax code so that “everybody is doing their fair share.”
Even comedians like Will Durst are putting their $.02 in:
When taxes are raised on the rich, oh sure – that’s class warfare. But when libraries are closed and national parks left to rot so rich people can have more money, that’s trickle-down economics. What Barack should do is rename his efforts to balance the playing field with trickle-up economics. That would at least confuse them (not that they need more confusion) – “You know what, you’re right! It is a class war you started it and your side winning.”
The Republicans are especially upset about a proposal called the Warren Buffet rule, which calls for billionaires to pay taxes at the same rate as their secretaries. The GOP puts more faith in the Jimmy Buffet rule which holds that anybody who worries about coming up with next month’s rent money next should start drinking margaritas until they pass out.
What is it with the rich? How much money do they need? How many cars can you drive? How many imported Beluga caviar cream cheese canapés can you consume at a single cocktail party?
President Obama's new fighting tone and tactics don't stop with shifting the narrative away from 24/7 deficit talk to debating the effects of income inequality. The "warrior" mentality extends to his campaign too as it prepares to aggressively challenge Republican attempts to suppress voter turnout:
COLUMBUS, Ohio — President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is helping activists in the battleground state of Ohio challenge an election law that would shorten the time for early voting, which helped Obama in his first run for the White House.
Opponents must gather roughly 231,000 valid signatures before the law’s effective date Friday in order to block it from being in place until after the presidential election next year. That election would be the earliest chance voters would have to weigh in on whether the overhaul should be tossed out.
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