There are good grounds to believe that President Obama's strategy of getting elected by appealing to independents is folly. In an eye-opening article in the New Republic today, Ruy Teixera argues that the majority of independents are not independent. Sixty-eight per cent of independents lean Republican or Democrat (38%-32% respectively), and they vote the way they lean. The remaining 32% have very small turnout (they were just 7% of voters). Even more important, independents are more concerned about the American job situation than the debt situation by a margin of 2/1. This may account for the free fall of Obama's reelection statistics among independents in the last few months.So Obama has succeeded in alienting his base while failing among independents at the same time.
If Obama had been speaking about unemployment for the past six months and proposing programs to address it, he would have done more to appeal to his base and independents, and he would have been doing the right thing. He now proposes to address unemployment with tax cuts. In so doing, he refuses to take on the Republican fiction that government spending to combat unemployment is anathema. He refuses to attack the abstraction of "spending" and replace it with necessary infrastructure for transportation and the environment, with teachers and education, with aid for families with housing needs. To be sure, Obama has been assisted by a Republican party whose lunatic tail wags an already diseased body. But Obama should be building a larger base by leading a battle against employment and giving more than lip service to the maxim that everyone must pay. Incredibly, in this age of impoverished memories, he still has time.
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