In Race To Replace Anthony Weiner, NYT Surprised To Find That The New Yorkers They're Supposed To Cover Aren't Thrilled With Obama

In a comment to the last post, Ben wrote:

When Republicans win it's because the public is angry or acting irrationally.

When the Democrats win it is a repudiation of Republican principles and ideas.

In an election where some 63 democratic house members lose to republicana and two republican congressmen lose their seats to democrat, it is a anti-incumbent election.

When Democrats prevent Republican legislation it is a principled stand.

When Republicans prevent Democrat legislation it is because they are petulant.

When Democrats cannot pass their social engineering programs, it is because the country is ungovernable.

When Democratic policies are unpopular it is because the President(or democrats) did a poor job selling or explaining the programs.

It goes on and on.

At Hot Air, this NYT quote finds them doing just that, yet again.

Dale Weiss, a 64-year-old Democrat, approached the Republican running for Congress in a special election and, without provocation, blasted the president for failing to tame runaway federal spending. “We need to cut Medicaid,” she declared, “but he won’t do that.” She shook her head in disgust. “He is a moron.”

After nodding approvingly for a time, the Republican candidate, Bob Turner, signaled for an assistant to cut off Ms. Weiss. Frustration with Mr. Obama is so widespread, he explained later, that he tries to limit such rants to about 30 seconds, or else they will consume most of his day. …

The race was widely viewed as a sleepy sideshow — a mere formality that would put David I. Weprin, a Democratic state assemblyman and heir to a Queens political dynasty, into a seat known for its deep blue hue.

Instead, the race has become something far more unsettling to Democrats: a referendum on the president and his party that is highlighting the surprisingly raw emotions of the electorate.

Raw emotions, see? Irrational. We're just all crazypants because we don't understand that Obama's policies will bear fruit in the year 2057 when we finally land a man on Mars.

I'd be curious to ask a media type -- put Anderson Cooper on the spot, say -- if he could name a single election in which Republicans won in which he'd say the public embraced Republican policies, and weren't simply reacting emotionally to a "flawed Democratic candidate" (Kerry, Gore) or a "poor messaging campaign" (the 2010 midterms) or having "a temper tantrum" (the 1994 Republican capture of Congress).

I don't think they'd confess that even with Reagan, who is long dead and therefore safe for the Democrats to praise. But the media would say the public was simply reacting to the poor economic and foreign policy record of Jimmy Carter, rather than affirmatively choosing the Reaganite policy prescriptions.

And, even to the extent they did, they'd be responding to his "simplistic" messages.

I have never in my life understood the liberal claim that Republican messages are "simplistic" and easy to explain to the dummies whereas Democratic messages are complex and involve all sorts of higher-level cognitive functions which the public cannot easily digest.

The Democrats want to give people free shit and make other people pay for it.

Um, this is complicated?

You know what's complicated? Trying to argue that higher taxes on the rich cause the secondary effect of a punitive environment for wealth creation and wind up discouraging economic risk (no reward, in this case, means no risk) and therefore tends to create a flat or negative growth rate.

Compare that to "free shit" which we're going to make "corporate fatcats" buy for you.

Complicated: I realized there is one way in which Democratic policies are "complicated."

Most Democratic policies are designed to hide the fact that the middle class will end up funding them in one way or the other. If you're spending trillions, you cannot avoid taking a large chunk of that from the middle class -- and the middle class is where the money is, in aggregate.

Rich people have a lot of money, as individuals, but there aren't many of them; the number of super-rich is tiny.

But the middle class has a fair amount of money as individuals, and 60% of the country is middle class.

So the "complexity" in Democratic schemes comes mainly in the form of a deliberately obscure funding mechanism which is crafted precisely to hide the fact that bulk of the funding for Democratic schemes is coming right out of the hide of the middle class.

Like ObamaCare, for example.

But the public often -- not enough, but often -- sees through this and even if they don't get the exact details of the complicated forced-subsidy scheme, they can figure out whether they're going to be net winners in these games or net losers.

When a majority of the middle class accurately deduces they are being asked to pay (or give up some of their own health-care benefits) to fund someone else, the media calls them either stupid or irrational for failing to be deceived by Democratic claims.

Actually, they wised up. And the media is angry at them for wising up.

posted by Ace at 01:43 PM

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