William McGurn would like you to grasp it firmly, please:
[NRO’s Reihan Salam], a policy adviser at the pro-market think tank Economics 21, observes that the revenues Mr. Obama needs to pay for his agenda fall in the rung just below the super-rich—that is, Americans earning between $100,000 and $200,000. The political problem is that this is a block that went Republican by 56% to 43% in 2010.
[snip]
[TNR/Brooking Institute’s William Galston] cheerfully supports raising taxes on those with incomes between $100,000 and $250,000 to support progressive policies and help tame the deficit. He is simply honest enough to know that Mr. Obama cannot get the top 2% of income earners to pay for everything he has promised to do.
Stupidly promised to do, by the way. Just to make that clear: insanely increasing spending to the point where you’ll have to explicitly break an explicit promise:
…is, well, insane. And stupid. And naive. And kind of ignorant. I can keep this going for a while, but you get the drift.
What’s that? You want advice for the President? Gee, I recommend he do one thing: suffer. Nobody twisted Barack Obama’s ego’s arm and made it make promises that Obama’s body couldn’t cash.
See you in 2012!
Moe Lane
I doubt that Obama is worried because he is a sociopath and sociopaths only make promises to get what they want with no intention ever of delivering what they promised in exchange. Obama has plenty of practice in evading the consequences of not being able to deliver on his promises. His repertoire includes destroying people who object to his lies through false counter-attacks (RAAACISTS!!!!), addling (telling so many different stories it is impossible to make sense of them and tell which, if any, is true), humiliating and/or shaming everyone who wants his promises kept, befogging (vague promises) and stalling (the promises will be kept in the indefinite future). My concern is that sociopaths who fail with the above techniques then turn to rage and force. What methods of force does he have available to him? I think we need to consider, at least, the worst-case scenarios this worst-of-presidents may consider himself entitled to create.
It doesn’t matter that Our President is breaking his explicit promises — damn near all of them — because the Institutional Media don’t care and won’t make a big deal of it. He’s like a god, you know, and he must be doing whatever he’s doing for the best of reasons. We simple peasants are just too stupid to appreciate his greatness.
Now, if he were an evil RethugliKKKan, that would be a different story …