Martin Wolf: 'U.S. Voters Are Suing Dr. Obama'

Financial Times :

An ambulance stops by the roadside to help a man suffering from a heart attack. After desperate measures, the patient survives. Brought into hospital, he then makes a protracted and partial recovery. Then, two years later, far from feeling grateful, he sues the paramedics and doctors.

Read the whole story: Financial Times

Comments

[luckyone77]

01:28 AM on 10/29/2010

The problem with the recovering heart attack patient analogy is that it does not reflect the reality of a large percentage of the population. Some have recovered from the recession. Many are still waiting and wondering if they every will. And some have slipped through the safety net entirely and lost everything. Thats why the response is less than enthusiastic, as more wealth has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. And there is a fear that in making light of their predicament the one so many had entrusted all their hopes to just does not get it

[JoeLeland]

01:56 PM on 10/28/2010

Your President has 48 ex Goldman Sachs employees that make up his Administration. One sits on the USSC, several sit on the Federal Reserve Bank of NY board. Some are installed on the NSA, and are members of the NSC. Many were installed as ambassadors of the nation they were heads of Goldman Sachs in Germany, Japan, China, France, and the UK.

So wall street has bought and paid for your President.

[FoonTheElder]

12:57 PM on 10/29/2010

So, according to your logic, Wall Street is overwhelmingly contributing to Republicans this year because the Republicans will crack down on Wall Street's abuses? Not a chance!

The Republican proposals are nothing more than stating that the Bush Administration of letting industry run the government were the good old days.

[JoeLeland]

01:06 PM on 10/29/2010

These are simple fact to inform you who is working for this administration.
I am not a Republican nor I am Democrat.
I am a Fiscal Conservative and Social Progressive.
To my mind we have not had a legitimate president since Nov 22 1963.
How do you jump to "according to my logic" ?????????????

[LucidPanther]

12:24 PM on 10/28/2010

I read an article today about how Europeans are confounded by how America - just 2 yrs after electing Obama - have become reactionary and are now vilifying a man with so much potential. They don't understand how so many Americans could possibly have thought that any man could inherit an economic collapse, two wars, a record deficit, etc. and fix it all in 18 months..

They are incredulous that some Americans call Obama a tyrant and compare him to Hitler as if Obama were preparing to exterminate 6 million people.

They seem to have foolishly overestimated Americans and interpreted the election of Obama as evidence Americans had finally joined the modern world, become enlightened, gotten past their racism and bigotries only to see the rise of a violent, racist, xenophobic, reactionary, jingoistic Tea Party.

I think that, not only Europeans, but the entire world worries about the Tea Party taking control of the largest military and nuclear arsenal on the planet. That is a very scary thought.

[Whigist]

07:26 AM on 10/28/2010

Also, Mr. Wolf -

Look to your own nation for instruction on this --- the UK's fiscal situation was and still is far worse than the U.S. - and it does not have the world's reserve currency....

And yet, with a stable, sensible government insisting on reducing bloated government and making draconian cuts to most areas what happens? Yes, the economy is performing better than expected, the pound is stable, and there is hope for the U.K....

A little bit of that medicine would be good for the U.S. as well.

[Whigist]

07:22 AM on 10/28/2010

Dear Mr. Wolf,

The patient was rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning after drinking too much debt for too long.

The doctors (president's Bush and Obama) prescribed more alcohol (debt), which made the patient feel better for a while, but where will the alcohol (debt) come from now ???

The patient senses this through his alcoholic haze and instinctively reaches for another doctor.

[Epimenides]

07:39 PM on 10/27/2010

A closer analogy is a doctor who sews up a gash in an accident victim's femoral artery but neglects to give a transfusion to replace the lost blood because the drunk driver who hit the victim is complaining it will cost too much.

[R Car]

08:09 PM on 10/27/2010

http://jdrourke.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/dear-impatient-americans/

[Epimenides]

11:02 AM on 10/29/2010

Your call for more patience is sweet, but it completely misses the point. Obama failed to propose progressive solutions such as a jobs program, single payer health care, and nationalization of the the corrupt banks when he had the chance. Instead, Obama embraced Wall Street corporate solutions of federal subsidies for billionaires, lower taxes for the rich, for-profit health care, increased government secrecy, continued rendition and torture by proxy, greatly expanded domestic surveillance, and escalated the wars in the Middle East..

Naturally, the corporate giveaways Obama enacted failed. Worse yet, he pretended that they were Democratic Party policies and thereby further discredited liberal politics.

After November, neither Obama nor the rest of the corporate Democrats will get a second chance to do things right. Your patience with Obama has anchored all of us to a corporate Republican controlled government.

Congratulations, but you always can keep hoping.

[jerryatthebeach]

07:24 PM on 10/27/2010

10/08 was staged to sway an election. It won't work again...

[FoonTheElder]

01:00 PM on 10/29/2010

10/08 was the result of Greenspan keeping interest rates too low to stage a Bush reelection in 2004. The resultant debt boom in both corporations and housing created the eventual crash.

[NJProgressiveIndie]

05:25 PM on 10/27/2010

Thank you Martin Wolf, for blowing a Grand Canyon sized-hole in the outright lies and distortions of the Republican/Rove/Tea Party propaganda apparatus about the economy. Unfortunately, I suspect the damage has already done--especially among so-called "Independent" voters who obviously aren't independent enough in their thinking or fact-checking NOT to fall for the outright lies and distortions of that apparatus.

And Mr. President, the moral of the story is: when it comes to solutions to save the country, go big--or go home--and TO HELL with the critics, spin doctors and "bi-partisanship."

[yappnmutt]

04:43 PM on 10/27/2010

like the us healthcare system the treatment of symptoms is mistaken for a cure. if the too big to fail banks were exposed as the bankrupt businesses they still are and all the bad debt(still being discovered) were quarantined in a "bad debt bank"(remove the malignant tumor), the too big to fail banks broken up(lost weight) and reincarnated as good (healthy) banks, the middle class given debt relief directly(instead of the banks), a monstrous dose of stimulus injected into the economy in the form of infrastructure improvement everyone could have been saved.

instead the banks and the top 1% were bailed out and the middle class was blamed for the excess while being told to take two aspirin/day until they get well.

given that both parties helped set up the path to failure the usa electorate have a choice of a necessary operation that will kill the patient choice.

[Butquestioning]

05:47 PM on 10/27/2010

I think the problem is that we are conflating different problems. The banks were on the verge of collapse and needed to be "bailed out" so that our financial system would survive. Most of that money has been repaid. But the second piece of this is to get the money in the hands of the people and restart the economy.

If we look at history, we see the samd thing happen in the 1930's. In the early years, FDR was able to convince the Congress that we needed some pretty drastic action to turn things around. But by 1938, the Republicans convinced many that we needed to stop all the spending and were successful at causing more unemployment and a dip in the GDP.

Today we have the Republicans yelling that we have spent too much and many are believing them while ignoring the very cause of the high unemployment - the cut in consumer spending. With only the government with the ability to spend, they have improved the economy but we are not out of the hole yet. Now the cries for "fiscal responsibility" from the very people that have shown the worst record in that regard have many believing them. Sad that we have people with such little understanding of basic economics. The rich sit on the huge cash stock piles and want more tax cuts and the average person is agreeing with them and looking like they are going to put the "convicts in charge of the

[m1urice]

04:40 PM on 10/27/2010

Great article because this President has boxed himself in at every turn because they don't just fight for the policy perscriptions that they desire. Instead, they look at political realities and ask for less. They have to explain to the American people why a course of action is correct and then stand their ground. If they have to compromise so be it but having a nonchalant attitude is confusing to voters. If you compromise after aggresively stating your case you then leave yourself room to say this is what I wanted but hopefully it will be enough. And if it's not enough you can say I told you so.

[Left of Right]

03:50 PM on 10/27/2010

"A large part of the American public has long since forgotten the gravity of the financial heart attack that hit the US in the autumn of 2008. The Republicans have convinced many voters that the intervention by the Democrats, not the catastrophe George W.Bush bequeathed, explains the malaise...."

GOP voters--it's not too late to wake up and go to factcheck.org.

[JoeTroll]

03:49 PM on 10/27/2010

This is why so many on the right are accused of racism... their "policy objections" are based on fallacies and outright lies. When people continue to make claims that aren't true, and ignore facts when presented to them, then the rest if us have to figure that the issues aren't actually the problem, which leaves either racism or political bigotry.

[NJProgressiveIndie]

05:27 PM on 10/27/2010

#102 F&F - Well who could blame them--the Southern Strategy is not only their most effective one--it's the ONLY one they have as a one-size-fits-all solution to EVERYTHING.

[AyeChart]

03:32 PM on 10/27/2010

A patient has pneumonia. He's finally beginning to recover, and then along comes Dr. Obama and throws in some toxic medications (deficit spending, massive regulation, demonizing and demagoguing the productive members of the economy, creating massive new entitlements), and the patient relapses. Every time he begins to improve, Dr. Obama administers another toxic agent.

That's closer to the reality.

[cdub1991]

03:44 PM on 10/27/2010

*Sigh*

Same old false metaphors. Same old limited cliches. Same old distorted views of reality.

[Left of Right]

03:51 PM on 10/27/2010

Fan'd & fav'd cause we're going to be sharing in the effects of their distorted reality.

[Guscat]

03:48 PM on 10/27/2010

You either did not read the article or you do not understand the idea of deficit spending in a recession. After the Wall Street melt down do you believe regulation should not have been addressed? Health care reform, which you call an entitlement, according to the CBO, is a net positive for the deficit. As for "demagoguing" all that can be said is it is sad the bankers who were bailed out have such tender feelings.

[AyeChart]

03:59 PM on 10/27/2010

I understand the idea of it just fine. I also understand the REALITY of it, which is that it has never been demonstrated effective and has been (refer to Nathan's Edge Blogspot and his graph of GDP versus deficit spending. The deficit spending in 2009 DEPRESSED the economy 45 cents per each dollar spent)

That I disagree with you doesn't mean I don't understand economics.

[AyeChart]

04:01 PM on 10/27/2010

Also, O Great Econ Genius, if deficit spending was good for the economy, why did we have a recession in the first place? Weren't the Democrats decrying the Bush deficit spending? Why wasn't the economy humming along during the deficit spending of 2006-2008?

[eric14]

01:34 PM on 10/27/2010

This rightist propaganda coup was facilitated by diversion of focus on to health care. First year of office should have relentlessly headlined the economy and processes of fixing it.

[Guscat]

03:37 PM on 10/27/2010

If the adminisration had not pushed for health care reform it would have been criticized for not living up to its promises. The proposals Mr Wolfe suggested in hindsight could have been done with health care also being passed.

[cdub1991]

03:40 PM on 10/27/2010

And then everyone would have shouted even louder about how he didn't keep his campaign promises. It was a political no win situation. In the no win scenario, the only reasonable response it to just do what you think is right and let the chips fall. Obama came into office with a longer policy time horizon then the American people have had to think about in quite awhile. If we stayed the course Obama laid out in the campaign, it would be worth it for the long term health of the country, but Americans no longer have the fortitude to sustain short term setbacks for long term gain.

[Left of Right]

03:52 PM on 10/27/2010

Well said!

[OSCPJ]

03:56 PM on 10/27/2010

Campaign promises over the Economy? The president had a chance to come in and do the right thing. He did not do the right thing.