Now that President Obama has been on the job for a couple of months, at least one national mainstream media columnist is willing to tell us what the president is really up to:
[A] bigger, more fateful drama is underway in the Speaker’s office. It’s about nothing less than whether the Obama administration can reverse a generation’s worth of skepticism about the role of government in our lives. The federal budget is the Rosetta stone of American public philosophy, and Obama and
Emanuel want to re-chisel it in expensive new ways: quality health care
for all; better, more innovative public education; a rewritten IRS code
that taxes the wealthy more heavily to channel benefits to lower-income
Americans; and a new global effort to slow climate change.
Better late than never, but it would have been nice for Mr. Fineman and his colleagues to share this insight about Obama’s ideas when voters still had a chance to decide whether they wanted such expensive re-chiseling. Instead we read the stuff Jon Sanders chronicled so well.
