The Great Leap Sideways

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

"It’s actually some 30 years ago, but to me seems only yesterday that we were howling for Paul Volcker’s blood. As Fed chairman back in Carter-Reagan time he was the great deflator, ratcheting up interest rates and hurling widows and orphans out into the snow. And here he is now, the shining knight of the left, for months languishing in obscurity as head of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, now mustered to Obama’s side to preside over the White House’s Great Leap Sideways into economic populism."

"Can Obama recover the initiative? This leap sideways in the direction of the left comes eleven months behind schedule, and politics is an unforgiving time-keeper. He should have been holding that Thursday press conference last February, when he still had favorable winds in his sails. Instead he wasted most of the year destroying all prospects for decent health reform. The best we can hope for now is rejection by the House of the Senate’s bill, with the whole awful package dumped in the shredder. Maybe the White House should try some new imaginative approach, like combining preventive health care with airline security. All people going through the TSA’s full body scans would get, gratis, a full diagnostic printout, from teeth to tumors and the right to free consultations at health clinics run by the Department of Homeland Security."