Should Democrats Bash Bush–or Wall Street?

Both. And the GOP…

Can the blame be placed on any one side of the aisle? If a large number of people blame Bush and just as many believe Obama has not effectively managed the economy, why is our choice between solely Bush and Wall Street?
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A larger issue here is why we are trying to blame each other for the problems we have rather than spending our time fixing them.
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Oh wait – it’s an election season.

@ 1.1~
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Excellent points, of course
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In fact, it seems that in national politics, it has been perpetual election season at least since the Contract With America reaction to the huge Clinton popularity.

Rove is a clown. But I have to give the guy some credit for his efforts at misdirection. Take this paragraph:

Here the biggest blame for the recession went to “big banks and Wall Street” (34%), followed by “American consumers who lived beyond their means” (24%). Thirteen percent blamed Mr. Obama, 20% blamed Mr. Bush, and 9% were still in the “don’t know category.” Put another way, at least 80% didn’t blame Mr. Bush, as Mr. Obama obsessively does.

Did you catch that? Rove lists the culprits in descending order of blame…except that he reverses Obama and Bush, and hides this sleight of pen by writing Obama’s number as “thirteen percent” rather than “13%”.

Brer Rove is also a reliable practitioner of reverse psychology:

Mr. Obama’s fixation with blaming his predecessor has badly weakened him. Constantly engaging in the blame game makes the president look enfeebled and whiny rather than sturdy and confident. One of any president’s most important possessions is his reputation for strong leadership.

Thank goodness Rove is here to give the Democrats such friendly advice! Unless they listen to him, they might make the terrible political mistake of relentlessly staying on message and demonizing their political opponents. Surely nobody could win a political campaign by employing such tactics!

What Rove does understand better than most Democrats is that polls are simply snapshots in time. A Democrat might look at a poll and assume that if more people don’t blame Bush then it isn’t worth blaming him. Rove will look at a poll as a challenge: “Only 13% blame Obama? Wait until we get done with him.”

Even if the Repubs had superior ideas, they wouldn’t take hold right away. I know people need jobs yesterday, but there’s little or nothing any party can do to bring jobs about right away.

Until we look at the whole economic picture, there are no clear answers.
. We have lost most manufacturing jobs to other countries.
. Retraining wont work. Train for what jobs?
. Businesses wont hire as long as they can squeeze every last ounce of productivity out of workers, pay less, and demand more.
Extending tax breaks wont change this.
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Anectodal evidence:
My son is a claims adjuster. He works 10 hours a day, Mon. through Fri. He goes into the office to do work on Sats. and Suns. He works on reports in the evening at home. The adjuster staff in his office has been more than halved. He also finds time to travel for mediations. No pay raises for over a year for any employee.
Now why would any business hire more people.
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He could quit but to be hired where?

Potatoes or stuffing.
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False choice.
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“Rove expects Democrats to get clobbered this fall.”
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Well he has shown in the past the he has “his math”

@1.2
Is it just me, or does that seem to correspond to the end of balanced budgets and the beginning of deficit spending?
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No matter, is there any way to feasibly end this circle of election styled gridlock politics? I do not think anyone can deny that politics have become far more stuck in recent years, and yet no one has presented viable ideas. If anything, the only time rhetoric aimed at ending gridlock has been used is by more politicians who say they will ‘change Washington’ who have not had a difference if they were ever elected.
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During Obama’s campaign in 2008, he made many promises about attempting to work with Republicans and reaching across the aisle. Ultimately, the tactics from both sides of the aisle prevented this from happening. It honestly makes me wonder if this endless election style cycle can ever be broken.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/8/12/14917/1733
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Democrats should bash the traditional media.
Above is a link to a transcript of Mike Allen being interviewed by Hugh Hewitt. He is a regular. They seem to find the idea of a 50/50 split in the Senate hilariously funny. So good for the media.
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This is why I despise Politica and those reporters who use it as a source. You can’t get anymore isolated than Politico.

Who are you and Rove kidding? Fuld and Wall Street aren’t up for election. They don’t need their negatives driven up. The party that did the most to allow Wall Street run rampant does.

Which one is that? The “business is always right” Rs or the spineless Ds that stood by and let them?

Take your pick.

Haven’t you heard that requiring people to carry insurance is unconstitutional?? Make him work til he quits, then they’ll hire somebody at half his salary.

Why ain’t he in jail yet?

Still waiting for the Frogmarch.
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On the other hand if Rove’s microphone is FNC and The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed (and Crowely’s echo) then I guess that’s pretty marginalized.
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A start.

The Democratic message should be the reality that everyone can see before them: the economy was wrecked by psychopathic greedheads running our largest banks, hedge funds, mortgage lenders and insurance companies, aided and abetted by corporatist “conservative,” politicians, both Republican and Democrat, and a giant, corporatist right-wing propaganda machine for which there is no reality-check by the mainstream press; vote for the least industry-corrupted progressive Democrat you can find and then get to work keeping corporate money from turning all of our public servants into corporate whores. Though that reality is even less likely to come from Third-Way corporatist Democrats than from you.

Michael Crowley:
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…a recent survey by the centrist Democratic outfit Third Way shows that…
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…no matter what the situation, liberals are always wrong, and the Third Way is always the correct policy and political prescription for Democrats, which means never over-alienating the movement conservatives with whom New Dems must always collaborate to some degree in order to fulfill Third Way principles.
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Do I have that right?

So, you want some economic populism?? Have a look here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/08/11/GR2010081106717.html

Any Dem candidate that doesn’t use this non-partisan analysis is committing political malpractice.

“Democrats should bash the traditional media.”
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And then the dems would have to believe that the traditional media would do something other than give it a three sentence coverage on page 36 or else roll their eyes on tv and say the dems are bashing the messenger AGAIN.

…hey, let’s just listen to Palin and the failed GOP, and go back to cut taxes / cut govt that we tried for the 3 decades of the Reagan/Bush era. In fact, let’s get ANOTHER big tax cut to the wealthiest as we did in 1981 and 2001.

I mean, that worked SO well to deliver Trickle Down prosperity. Almost nobody is unemployed now. And the banks and oil companies and health insurers, heck – they POLICED THEMSELVES!!! Get government out of the WAY by golly!

Abe Lincoln would have said;
“You can fool some of the people, ALL of the time”… ;^)

– Balkingpoints / www

@ 1.3~
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It’s not just you, but I suspect anything that looked like a balanced budget or non-deficit spending before that was a great deal of smoke-and-mirrors.
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After all, if you were a private banker with the authority to lend a government money, at interest, that only cost you the printing costs of, and that government had a really good story to tell its people to get them to innovate and produce their asses off to generate income on which to pay taxes to pay that interest, would you encourage fiscal policy to be one of NOT running a deficit?

That is very close to what both the Democrat AND Republican messages should be. THEN, we might begin to get somewhere. How ’bout?
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Everyone can see before them that the economy was wrecked by psychopathic greedheads running our largest banks, hedge funds, mortgage lenders and insurance companies, aided and abetted by corporatist “conservative,” politicians, both Republican and Democrat, and a giant, corporatist propaganda machine for which there is no reality-check by the mainstream press; vote for the least industry-corrupted progressive Republican or Democrat or Independent you can find and then get to work keeping corporate money from turning all of our public servants into corporate whores. Though that reality is unlikely to come from Third-Way corporatist Democrats or “regulation is bad” Republicans.

Traditionally voters go to Republicans in economic booms and Democrats during hard times.

Obviously the avalanche started by conservative policies unleashing unreasonable expectations, true greed and even outright fraud during those many years of Republican control of either both houses, the presidency or both fell on Obama, but, with no realistic sounding proposals, do Republicans have this huge advantage?

If Democrats can campaign on Republican obstruction of extended unemployment benefits and aid to cities and towns, I believe the lack of recovery could be turned to the Democrats advantage.

Then again, that presumes that Democrats can campaign as liberals and not as wishy washy third way wimps.

I say hold Bush and Republicans failed strategies up as the primary reason and unregulated greed on Wall Street secondary.

Karl Rove has a Wall Street Journal op-ed today worth the attention even of Democrats who can’t stand him.
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Why expose myself to Rove’s flesh-eating toxin when I can get Crowley to summarize it for free?
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But really, if I had to choose between seriously contemplating something Rove has to say, and sticking my arm into a fire ant nest up to the elbow, I’d start rolling up my shirtsleeves.

Shouldn’t the message include when, where, and how any, and not just a few, Democrats have and still do allow, support, and even outright craft legislation part-and-parcel to our current sorry state of affairs.
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It won’t help matters much if Democrats have a great message for getting elected, and then it turns out to have been a great message just to be in office to be able to suck up some spoils.
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We need individuals with the right stuff in positions of influence, not a Party where those without the right stuff get to call the shots because they got elected on the image of the ones with the right stuff.
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Yeah, yeah, I know. In toto, the Dems are much less dangerous to the health of this nation than are the Republicans in toto. But the Independents are probably even less dangerous, and no one thinks they have a snowball’s chance in hell to get much of any political seatings. It takes a critical mass to make any real serious paradigm changes. That isn’t going to happen unless all culprits are exposed (even then it will be hard.)

I have this to say:
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1. I don’t use polls to make my decisions about who’s at fault. The fault for the economic collapse falls on Wall Streets’, Bush’s, and the GOP’s shoulders.
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2. You can claim I’m partisan, but you can look at every recession, major or minor, and you will find that two years is a minimum duration!
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Got that?
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Minimum duration
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3. This was the second worst in modern US economic history, and the worst took a minimum of five years before even a hint of true recovery took place (1934-5).
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4. Obama has been in office 21 months and for most of that time, has been hamstrung by GOP obstructionism at every turn, relying on the unspoken, but truly dangerous argument that nothing should have been done.
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5. It is the right who really believes Obama is the Messiah, as they are constantly pounding him over the his failure to wave a magic wand and make it all go away.
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6. The GOP has never offered any workable plan for recovery. Their recovery plans are exclusively based on economic theories that blatantly failed between 2007 and 2009.
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7. Democrats had no say-so in Bush’s, Wall Streets’, or the GOP’s conduct. It took a panic throughout the entire business community over credit before Bush was finally forced to act. Until then, he was willing to depend entirely on “free market solutions”, which btw, the business community feared most!
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I will grant you this, though. The GOP has done a good job, and is going to make gains in November, but that is not a demonstration of who has better ideas.

Because they haven’t investigated Katrina…

“Republican” is a corporate function in its entirety. You might get some self-described “conservatives” if you had a reality-based press and some ability for liberal Democrats to publicly differentiate themselves from corporatist “conservative” Democrats.
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The problem in this country is that quite a lot of people can’t distinguish their friends from their enemies. The embargo of liberals from mainstream press outlets – and no remote equivalent to the ClearChannel/FOX/WSJ “conservative” propaganda machine – has meant that liberals have been defined by “conservatives”, whether D or R. Our only hope is that the collapse of the legacy media will somehow keep opening remaining corporate news media, especially cable, to something less beholden to the status quo. So far, the intertubes aren’t enough.

The syncophants are out in numbers today on this thread to continue the tired liberal meme to Blame it all on Bush
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Even now after almost FOUR YEARS of a democrat controlled Congress, with 2 years of Barack Obama, they still……STILL reach backwards into the past to blame someone else for the failings.
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Two things you better hope to hell on are;
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1. Republicans do take over, and it continues to fail
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2. That when Republicans take over Congress again, there is not a major recovery as it happened in 1994-2000.
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The problem is spending. The out-of-control spending by Democrats. The spending MUST be stopped, and cuts MUST be made to keep this massive ship we call the United States afloat.
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Put more of our hard earned tax dollars back into our pockets. Businesses will then begin to ramp up their factories and stores, and subsequently hire people again.
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The only thing the past 4 years have shown anyone who cares to look at the facts are that Democrats have controlled Congress and the Nation’s purse strings. They have out-spent all previous Administrations and Congresses in total before them.
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Now why in the hell would we want to put you people back in charge in 2010?

“The problem in this country is that quite a lot of people can’t distinguish their friends from their enemies.”
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That’s for sure

Please video the fire ant stunt and post it on you tube. we real Americans would love to see all you anti-American left wing kooks try this! What great entertainment.

It was the CRA and the Democrats bullying of lenders to make bad loans to people that could not and would not repay them that lead to today’s problems. The Obama regime have successfully made things far worse.
Blaming Bush is nothing but a lie, propaganda. Blaming Wall Street is just more anti-capitalist propaganda. There are far more intelligent citizens than the news media and Democrats realize.