Pulling out the good pieces
by digby
This is where the rubber is really going to meet the road for members of the US Senate. No more confusion about what they care about or who they are protecting:
With the full $447 billion jobs bill suffering defeat in the Senate, Obama and his aides are moving to a second phase, publicly pushing for passage of the bill piece by piece.
The first piece Obama wants is $35 billion in aid for states to prevent the laying off of or support increased hiring of teachers, police officers and fire fighters, Earnest said.
I think that’s politically smart. The big jobs bill went down to defeat without anyone really knowing what was in it. If the administration and Reid now pull out the most populist pieces of the bill and leave out the hideous giveaways to Big Business it becomes a useful political exercise. And who knows? Maybe a good piece of it might even pass. (Not likely, but elections have a way of focusing the minds of politicians.)
The administration got its sellout free trade deals done and that really should be enough of a ransom for the time being. The billionaires are whining anyway and supposedly giving all their money to Mitt. But that’s a good bet for them in any case. If President Obama does what they demand — offer a full throated defense of their pillaging and portray them as the Godlike job creators who must be worshipped regardless of their greed and ineptitude — well, he won’t be re-elected. He’s already put himself in danger of losing his coalition and has to count on the other side being so noxious to a majority of the public that they lose by default. And the Republicans just naturally make that argument more credibly — their worldview supports it.
I’m afraid the Third Wayers are in a real bind. They have done all they can on the QT to help out the Big Money Boyz and did quite a fine job of it under the circumstances. But the BMBs want to be publicly worshiped and that’s going to make it hard for the Third Wayers to walk their usual phony line. I’m afraid the zeitgeist calls for picking a side in this one.
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