Here's one reason why I'm not expecting big things from Hillary's economics vision speech tomorrow; bcause too many liberals don't believe anything big can be accomplished.
And the liberal punditry don't believe this either.
Mr. Frank hits another home run with this one at Salon.
As the Obama administration enters its seventh year, let us examine one of the era’s greatest peculiarities: That one of the most cherished rallying points of the president’s supporters is the idea of the president’s powerlessness.
But the pundit fixation on Obama’s powerlessness goes back many years. Where it has always found its strongest expression is among a satisfied stratum of centrist commentators—people who are well pleased with the president’s record and who are determined to slap down liberals who find fault in Obama’s leadership. The purveyors of this fascinating species of political disgust always depict the dispute in the same way, with hard-headed men of science (i.e., themselves) facing off against dizzy idealists who cluelessly rallied to Obama’s talk of hope and change back in 2008.
The first and most obvious excuse for all things Obama is, of course, the Republicans. Given their extreme intransigence and their many loathsome views, the steel-minded pundits say, we left-of-center citizens need to stand behind the president in complete, airtight unity. Criticism must not be permitted, lest our resolve be weakened and the hated Other prevail. In other lands, ideological enforcement of this kind is a task for a political party. But in the USA, where the Democratic president longs to achieve a Concert of K Street with the GOP, enforcing party discipline is a job for the punditry, and so I suggest we call this particular species of rationalization the MSNBC apologetic, after the network that is so famously reluctant to air any criticism of the president. It consists, in brief, of demanding a kind of solidarity with Democratic leaders that those Democratic leaders themselves only rarely show for their own rank and file.
BINGO!!!
Thus not only can I count on Hillary's expressed vision tomorrow being long on vision and short on an actual plan (i.e. how to significantly fund an "infrastructure bank"), I can count on some progressives and most of the liberal punditry to do their usual enabling of setting the bar very lowwwww.
I think it's more than fair to ask why anyone thinks The People are content with small beer economic plans.
http://www.salon.com/...
http://www.politico.com/...