Reich: Sour economy could put Sarah Palin in the White House

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Political economist and former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in a Christian Science Monitor blog rant so stuffed with liberal Democrat talking points along with buzz words and phrases that he employs the term "white working class" no less than seven times, concludes that the economy, stupid, could put Sarah Palin in the White House:

As I believe will become clearer, the Palin Strategy will involve a political threat to the GOP establishment: Deny her the nomination she’ll run as independent. This will split off much of the white working class and guarantee defeat of the Republican establishment candidate. It will also result in her defeat in 2012, but that’s a small price to pay for gaining the credibility and power to demand the nomination in 2016, or threaten another third-party run in 2020.

Once nominated, her campaign for the general election will be purely populist. She’ll seek to broaden her base to become the candidate of the people, taking on America’s vested Establishment.

More than anything else, the Palin Strategy depends on the continuing fear and anger of America’s white working class. She’s betting that their economic prospects will not improve by 2012, or even by 2016 and beyond.

Sadly, this is likely to be the case. On Tuesday, the Fed issued a gloomy prognosis. Even if the U.S. economy began to grow at a rate more typical of recoveries than the current anemic 2 percent, unemployment won’t drop to its pre-recession level for 5 to 7 years. A minority of the Fed thought this was too optimistic.

The disturbing truth is the bad economy is likely to continue for most Americans beyond 7 years — maybe for ten or more — because of a chronic lack of aggregate demand. Apart from inevitable inventory replacements and the necessary replacements by consumers of cars, appliances, and clothing that wear out, nothing will propel the U.S. economy forward.

[...]

The President seems unable or unwilling to provide the clear narrative that explains what’s happened and what needs to be done, and Republicans are at this moment ascendant.

It all fits into Sarah Palin’s strategy.

Reich, who drew the ire of his fellow liberals by essentially confirming Gov. Palin's warning about death panels before she even issued it, also invoked the word "anger" six times in his post and tossed in some other reliable old leftist pearls such as "racist," fascist," "fear" and "right wing" just for bad measure. To slam Sarah, he employed "snark," "snide," "sarcastic" and "revenge." One would think he was describing his old Clinton Crew colleague Paul Bergala, not Gov. Palin.

Reich's rant is pure Democrat fear mongering, race baiting and Palin demonizing, but it does offer one thing which is new, and it marks a key change in the Democrat's previously-employed narrative that she could win the GOP nomination, but never the general election. Another liberal Democrat has now admitted that Sarah Palin can not only win her party's nomination, but the presidency as well. The point of Reich's piece is to try to scare Democrats and those Vichy Republicans who read the CSMonitor into stopping her.

- JP

Sarah Palin Was Right #16: Obama Advisor Reich Admitted "We're going to Let You Die"

President Obama and his sycophants, including those in the drive-by media, have been brutal in their criticism of Sarah Palin for her "death panels" remark. the president even went so far as to call the former Alaska governor a liar in front of a joint session of Congress. But at least one Obama backer -- one of his economic advisors, in fact -- had the intellectual honesty to tell the truth.

Robert Reich, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor and now advises Obama on economic policy, revealed the truth about health care, statist style, in a 2007 speech at UC Berkeley:

I'll actually give you a speech made up entirely, almost on the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is and a candidate will never say, but what a candidate should say if we were in the kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship and they were educated in terms of what the issues were and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them:

"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And that's true and what I'm going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people...you're going to have to pay more.

"Thank you. And by the way, we're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die."

"Also I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid---we already have a lot of bargaining leverage---to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents. Thank you."

So much for Congressman Alan Grayson's claims that it is Republicans whose idea of health care is "We're going to let you die." Here's a very prominent Democrat, and an Obama advisor at that, who used Grayson's exact words -- "We're going to let you die -- two years earlier.

Gary Bauer, president of the 527 non-profit organization American Values, said in an e-mail to LifeNews.com that Reich's honest admission of the truth about the kind of Big Government mandated health care system Obama and the Democrats are pushing was "pretty shocking stuff":

"The media just couldn't believe it when Sarah Palin suggested that government-run, socialized health care would lead to 'we're going to let you die' death panels," he said in response. "But that’s exactly what Reich said."

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"How could anyone possibly call that reform? Sadly, many politicians do," he concluded. "Reich essentially admitted that Palin was right."

Indeed he did, and indeed she was.

- JP