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Consortium News
December 28, 2010
At a closed-door White House meeting this month, President Barack Obama justified his repeated concessions to the Right as necessitated by its success over three decades in selling Ronald Reagan’s anti-government message to broad sectors of the American public.
The National Journal reported that Obama met with liberal economists Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, Alan Blinder and Robert Reich on Dec. 7, just hours before a press conference at which the President criticized his liberal “base” for taking “sanctimonious” and “purist” positions rather than making the compromises required to help Americans in the real world.
In both venues, Obama defended his deal with Republicans on extending George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich as necessary to gain Republican support for extended unemployment benefits and for tax breaks to boost the economy and help working- and middle-class Americans.
However, at the earlier White House meeting, Obama told the economists that he felt handcuffed by the Right’s ability to rally Americans on behalf of Reagan’s “government-is-the-problem” message. "It was hard to change the narrative after 30 years” of Republican repetition about the evils of big government, one participant quoted Obama as saying.
“He seemed to be looking for a way to reassure the base” about where his heart really was on these questions, said the participant who spoke anonymously. “Or maybe it was just to reassure himself.”
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