{"id":2025,"date":"2009-03-17T06:14:21","date_gmt":"2009-03-17T06:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2009-03-17T06:15:20","modified_gmt":"2009-03-17T06:15:20","slug":"peasants_with_p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2025","title":{"rendered":"Peasants With Pitchforks"},"content":{"rendered":"

…speaking of pitchforks, here’s the NY Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is increasingly concerned about a populist backlash against banks and Wall Street, worried that anger at financial institutions could also end up being directed at Congress and the White House and could complicate President Obama’s agenda.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ya think??<\/p>\n

Look it’s been an wonderful party up in the skyboxes, with the well-connected getting favorable regulation (or lack of regulation) in return for the occasional real estate deal or cottage in Ireland.
I’ve been beating this drum for a while, and the Democrats and Republicans should be competing to see who can hang their own worst offenders (Jim Moran? John Murtha? Alphonso Jackson? Don Young?). the party that had done that by now would be standing tall on the rubble of their opposition. Instead, both parties (sadly, the GOP slightly less than the Democrats) circled the wagons and defended the Charles Rangels and Jerry Lewises.<\/p>\n

So now, the fiscal collapse and crisis in confidence in our institutions is being met by a bunch of cowering apparatchniks who are desperate for one more turn at the giant rice bowl. And when the people do finally lose patience, the problem is that the political class will have done more than enough to justify the collateral damage they will take.<\/p>\n

It’s not too late. Obama could get up tomorrow and start throwing elbows at Rangel, Jefferson, and Dodd for starters. Few would buy that it’s a really moral position, and many would see it as more cynical tossing ‘under the bus’.<\/p>\n

But it will be better than the alternative.<\/p>\n

For all his political skills and his capturing of the nation’s desire for change in the 2008 election, Mr. Obama, a product of Harvard Law School who calls upscale Hyde Park in Chicago home, has shown little inclination to strike a more populist tone. The danger, aides said, is that if he were to become identified as an advocate for the banks and Wall Street, people could take out their anger on him.<\/p>\n

“The change now is you have a free-floating economic anxiety that has expressed itself in a kind of lashing out at those being bailed out and people who are bailing out,” Michael Kazin, a professor at Georgetown University who has written extensively on populism. “There’s not really a sense of what the solution is.”<\/p>\n

“I do think there’s a potential for a ‘damn everybody in power’ kind of sentiment,” Mr. Kazin said. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wonder if he drinks tea.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adam Nagourney thinks the people may revolt. That’s why he gets the big dollars…the irreplaceable insight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}