Progressive Opinion

inthesetimes.com — Mitt Romney was ridiculed by the liberal media when he complained to wealthy donors, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.” To Romney, these voters are united by a dependency on government and a belief that “they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” Seething with contempt for half of America, Romney is a caricature of an out-of-touch elite. He’s also, in a twisted way, right. A movement to expand the welfare state has the potential to foster a new majoritarian Left coalition. Republicans know this—that’s why they manipulate the way welfare is perceived at every turn.

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inthesetimes.com — The Left should fight for programs that provide health services, educate children, bolster the income of the less-well-off and subsidize housing. The reasons are obvious. The first is a simple moral imperative: A good society strives to meet the basic needs of all its people. The second is that government programs that protect people from the exigencies of labor markets, or of old age, or orphanhood, or disability, make people more secure. A sense of security, the reduction of fear, is a good thing in itself. But it also empowers people, and for that reason is essential to a more democratic society. Workers are far more likely to stand up to their bosses when they know they can fall back on decent unemployment benefits, just as women are more likely to stand up to abusive husbands when they know that they and their children can rely on government income supports.

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washingtonpost.com — Everywhere you turn, President Obama is accused of not offering a clear second-term agenda. It’s not surprising that Republicans say it, but you also hear it from quarters sympathetic to the president. But how true is the charge? The president does lack a crisp, here’s-my-plan set of sound bites. What’s less obvious is whether this should matter to anyone. Mitt Romney’s five-point plan sounds good but is quite vague and, upon inspection, looks rather like five-point plans issued by earlier Republican presidential candidates. Moreover, Romney has been resolutely unspecific about his tax plans, leading to the understandable suspicion that he’s hiding something politically unsavory, either in the popular deductions he’d have to slash or in the programs he’d have to get rid of. Obama, by contrast, has been far more straightforward about what he would do about the deficit.

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robertreich.org — President Obama should propose that the nation’s biggest banks be broken up and their size capped, and that the Glass-Steagall Act be resurrected. It’s good policy, and it would smoke out Mitt Romney as being of, by, and for Wall Street — and not on the side of average Americans. It would also remind America that five years ago Wall Street’s excesses almost ruined the economy. Bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity traders speculated on the upside, then shorted on the downside — in a vast zero-sum game that resulted in the largest transfer of wealth from average Americans to financial elites ever witnessed in this nation’s history.

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alternet.org — “Government, keep your hands off my Medicare!” Commentators and comedians alike had fun with the cognitive dissonance represented by the statement above, found on more than one hand-scrawled sign at Tea Party rallies. But while opposition to government is more at home on the political right, ignorance about the role of government is a bipartisan malady. Liberals may shake their heads at the “ignorance” of the Right, but we’ve seen focus groups in San Francisco comprised of liberal Democrats argue about whether or not the Bay Area Rapid Transit system is public transportation. Years of research and polling have shown that there is a broad lack of understanding about the role of government in our everyday lives. Many Americans are unaware of just what’s public and what’s private. Why is that? Government programs may be victims of their own success. When a public system works well, it becomes less visible.

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thegrio.com — Following President Obama’s strong performance in Tuesday’s debate, Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have seized on a new line of attack: the president isn’t being specific enough about his second term agenda. Non-partisan analysts are making the same claim, namely that Obama must provide more details about what he would do in his next four years to win. They’re wrong. Even though he’s not talking about these ideas much on the campaign trail, it’s likely Obama would push for immigration and energy reform and a long-term budget deficit reduction deal in a second term. But perhaps the most important goal of an Obama second term, one he has nodded at himself at times, is preserving the accomplishments of his first term.

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inthesetimes.com — In 1818, the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, New York’s first anti-poverty organization, issued a report advocating the need to relieve “the community from the pecuniary exactions, the multiplied exactions, and threatening dangers” associated with paupers. These middle-class worthies were alarmed at the cost of heating the almshouse in winter, the appearance of women and children scavenging for coal and food scraps along city streets, and the able-bodied men left idle by a serious economic downturn. The report listed the causes of urban poverty: intemperance in drinking, idleness, “want of economy,” gambling, pawnbrokers and “imprudent and hasty marriages.” Nowhere in the 20-page document did the authors mention the twin burdens of urban laboring people: low wages and few jobs. The Society’s report brings to mind Mitt Romney’s comment about the 47 percent. Yet unlike Romney, many Americans are indeed worried about poverty.

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salon.com — Lilly Ledbetter. Planned Parenthood. Contraceptive coverage as “not just a health issue; it’s an economic issue for women.” No one could say President Obama wasn’t making a direct approach to women, the one his allies have been begging him to make. He might have just handed the mic to Sandra Fluke — or Ledbetter herself. And Romney? He had “binders full of women” that became an instant meme for Obama’s re-energized voting base, and he blamed single parents — women, really — for gun violence. Forget, if you can for a moment, the absurd jump from gun violence to stigmatizing single mothers without a shred of evidence. What does Mitt Romney have to offer those often-vulnerable female-headed households? You don’t need a binder for that kind of thin and inadequate solution.

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thegrio.com — President Obama followed the model of his vice-president in his second debate with Mitt Romney, repeatedly accusing his opponent of giving misleading answers and appearing to annoy the ex-governor at times. Largely ignoring the crowd of 80 people at the town hall at Hofstra University in New York, Obama redirected nearly every question the audience asked at the town hall to a pointed attack on his opponent, much like Joe Biden did in his debate against Paul Ryan. The most memorable moment came near the debate’s end, when Romney and Obama were asked about the killing of four Americans including the ambassador, in Libya last month.

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robertreich.org — He’s back.  Tonight our president was articulate and forceful — in sharp contrast to his performance in the first presidential debate. He stated his beliefs. He defended his record. He told America where he wanted to take the nation in his second term.  And he explained where Romney wanted to take us.

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