The Enthusiasm Gap

Robert Reich didn’t quite say it this way in his essay, but a distinction needs to be made between good government and bad government. It’s more important than the distinction between big government and small government, which the political parties argue about, and which overlooks the point that our government has, as Robert Reich complains, “rot at the center of the system.”  So while government might be the only tool to fix the system, bigness when rotten makes matters worse. – Ilene 

The Enthusiasm Gap

Courtesy of Robert Reich 

I had dinner the other night with a Democratic pollster who told me Dems are heading toward next fall’s mid-term elections with a serious enthusiasm gap: The Republican base is fired up. The Dem base is packing up. 

The Dem base is lethargic because congressional Democrats continue to compromise on everything the Dem base cares about. For a year now it’s been nothing but compromises, watered-down ideas, weakened provisions, wider loopholes, softened regulations.

Health care went from what the Dem base wanted — single payer — to a public option, to no public option, to a bunch of ideas that the President tried to explain last week, and it now hangs by a string as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid try to round up conservative Dems and a 51-vote reconciliation package in the Senate.

The jobs bill went from what the base wanted — a second stimulus — to $165 billion of extended unemployment benefits and aid to states and locales, then to $15 billion of tax breaks for businesses that make new hires.

Financial regulation went from tough new capital requirements, sharp constraints on derivate trading, a consumer protection agency, and a resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act – all popular with the Dem base — to some limits on derivatives and a consumer-protection agency inside the Treasury Department and a rearrangement of oversight boxes, and it’s now looking like even less.

The environment went from the base’s desire for a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade carbon auction then to a cap-and-trade with all sorts of  exemptions and offsets for the biggest polluters, and now Senate Dems are talking about trying to do it industry-by-industry. 

These waffles and wiggle rooms have drained the Democratic base of all passion. “Why should I care?” are words I hear over and over again from stalwart Democrats who worked their hearts out in the last election. 

The Republican base, meanwhile, is on a rampage. It’s…

Read the original story at Phil’s Stock World