What’s a Moderate Journalist Worth?

     For too long our mainstream news reporters have followed the journalistic convention that Congressional Democrats who vote with Republicans are “moderates”.  This is a purely Republican rhetorical construct repeatedly used by Mitch McConnell and company, which has been well dissected by Jonathan Bernstein.  

     During the long drawn-out negotiations with such so-called moderates about the Affordable Care Act, the law was weakened to the point that the bill’s primary accomplishment – if  not overturned by the Supreme Court next spring – is that the federal government will subsidize Americans to purchase private health insurance plans. There is nothing moderate about this outcome:  it leaves all the for-profit players in control of the health system and has virtually no cost controls whatsoever. 

     The latest triumph of so-called moderation occurred yesterday when Democratic “moderates” in the Senate supported the Republicans’ filibuster of one piece of President Obama’s Jobs bill.  Tonight, the News Hour duly dubbed the renegades “moderates”.  What is moderate about voting against a proposal to keep police, firemen, and teachers on the job at the cost of a ½ of one percent tax on incomes over $1million?  An individual with an annual income of $1.1 million would pay $500 more in taxes beginning with the 2013 tax year! What is not moderate about that? The tax would keep hundreds of thousands of public employees at work. The president had proposed a tax increase for household incomes over $250,000, but Senate leaders reduced the tax take to a surcharge on millionaires.  Even Karl Rove’s outfit’s polls found that surcharge was supported by two-thirds of the American people.  

     When will the News Hour and other “moderate” news reporters wise up and escape the Republican narrative?  

Repudiation, Not Responsiblity

Just as the President is gearing his rhetoric for combat with the Republican No Deal Party which won’t pass his new jobs plan, the Vice-President is muddying the message:

Vice President Joe Biden acknowledges that it’s time to hold the Obama administration’s feet to the fire for the sorry state of the U.S. economy instead of continuing to blame President George W. Bush.

“Right now, understandably — totally legitimate — this is a referendum on Obama and Biden and the nature of the state of the economy,” Biden said during an interview with South Florida public radio station WLRN this afternoon.

Biden made the startling comment during an interview in which his main goal was to pitch for support of President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act.

The vice president dismissed polls in which people continue to blame the Bush administration for the economy.

“Even though 50-some percent of the American people think that the economy tanked because of the last administration, that’s not relevant,” Biden said. “What’s relevant is we’re in charge. And right now we are the ones in charge and it’s gotten better, but it hasn’t gotten good enough.”  (September 29, 2011 Newsmax Wire)

Biden has not received the message that turning the other cheek is no longer strategy.  To the contrary, what the White House needs to do is to repudiate the past regime.  The economy is not progressing because of the enormous failures of neo-liberal ideology as a philosophy for governing the country.  The failures are well-known – the gross irresponsibility of the financial CEOs, the regulatory failures to prevent dangerous food in the food supply, the failure of the tax code to get the extremely rich and powerful to pay their fair share, the scape-goating of the unionized middle-class, the BP blow-out in the Gulf, the enormous unfunded expense of the war in Iraq, and on and on. These are Republican problems caused by Republican policies and the President is not responsible for them.  Without repudiation of the past policies, the Democrats cannot change the subject and take the country in a new direction.