Panhandlers

Ed Stein's commentary:

The battle over allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans has reached the election year boiling point. The Democrats (finally) are framing this debate properly and putting Republicans on the defensive, so much so that House minority leader John Boehner got spooked and said that he’d support extending the middle class tax cuts even if the cuts for those making more than $250,000 were not included. This was met with derision from the rest of his party, which smells victory in November and is no mood to compromise on anything. Republicans are having a hard time justifying extending a unpaid-for tax cut that will cost the government some $750 billion, while simultaneously demanding that the deficit be reduced. Nobody is buying the old trickle-down theory that the wealthy need that money to create jobs. They’ve got the money; where are the jobs? I do love the accusation that asking for the rich to pay their share is “class warfare.” The top 1% now receive 23% of the nation’s income, the highest level since before the Great Depression. The class war has already been won, and it’s the rest of us who lost.

That said, the GOP somehow still seems to be winning the populist points in this election. Now that the Dems have at least one argument in their favor, perhaps the bloodbath won’t be quite as horrendous come November, assuming the party can stay on message, which never seems to be its strong suit.

From what I hear, the worst of it isn't even that we Americans are too dumb, although that's certainly a major part. But the country is fairly evenly split in political opinion, at least. No, the worst of it is that Democrats are just too lazy or too apathetic to vote. When you look at likely voters, rather than just registered voters, the GOP wins in a landslide.

That's amazing, because less than two years ago, after the 2008 elections, the right-wing was down in the dumps. The Republicans had done nothing right when they held power, their president was (rightly) considered one of the worst in U.S. history (the worst, I'd say), and they were busy running even further to the right, losing every even half-way sensible moderate in the process.

So how did we end up here? I don't get it. Did people just expect the Democrats to wave a magic wand and instantly fix everything it took the Republicans eight years or more to break? We all know it's easier to destroy than to build, and it's been only a year and a half!. What did we expect? I'm not overly impressed with Barack Obama's performance, at least in boldly leading our country in a new direction, as he promised. (Admittedly, he also promised to compromise.) But I'm just astonished at how dumb the American people have turned out to be. Haven't we learned anything?

Or, as I say, how lazy we've turned out to be. We progressives want to change course, but we can't even be bothered to vote! It's just embarrassing. Dumb or lazy, take your pick. Either way, we Americans don't look too admirable. In a democracy, we get the kind of leadership we deserve. Can any democracy survive government by the people when the people are like this?