Marco.org

By Robert Reich:

Unless the President and Democrats explain why the economy still stinks for most Americans and offer a plan to fix it, the Republican explanation and solution – it’s big government’s fault, and all we need do is shrink it – will prevail.

That will mean more hardship for tens of millions of Americans. It will make it harder to remedy the bad economy. And it will set Republicans up for bigger wins in the future.

I’m tired of seeing the same story play out: Republicans present a coherent and incendiary (and usually completely false) narrative that appeals to the ignorant and is repeated often enough by the media that it’s perceived as truth, and the Democrats respond with ineffective “compromise” and a complete lack of a competing narrative.

One of the reasons I have little hope for U.S. politics is that the Democrats are chronically ineffective at pursuing a significantly different agenda than the Republicans. We have two political parties in name only — they both pursue the same wealth-concentrating, corporatist agenda, but at least the Republicans don’t fill us with false hope for positive change before they screw us a little more each year.