The "vision thing" again

The Democratic Party could learn a lot from the Right:

Can You Say, Fascism? The Political Consequences of Stagnation

by Walden Bello

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/02-6

"The blunder was Obama's taking responsibility for the crisis in a gesture of bipartisanship, in contrast to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who "refused to take any blame for the economic hardships." Reagan and Thatcher devoted "the early years of their government to convincing voters that economic disaster was entirely the responsibility of previous left-wing governments, militant unions, and liberal progressive elites." "

The "vision thing" again. It must really sting Democrats to realize that all the "Hope and Change" rhetoric was just so much vacuous sloganeering. A rather cynical exercise in exploiting the anxiety of the electorate for short-term political gain:

"But progressives should not take comfort from the dead end offered by tea party economics. They should try to understand what has led to the failure of Obama's pallid Keynesianism. Beyond the tactical mistake of taking responsibility for the crisis and the failure to advance an aggressive anti-neoliberal narrative to explain it, the central problem that has plagued Obama and his team is their failure to offer an inspiring alternative to neoliberalism. ... For progressives, the lesson to be derived from the stalling of Obamanomics is that technocratic management is not enough. Keynesian moves must be part of a broader vision and program. ... such a program cannot simply be dished out from above by a technocratic elite, as has been the fashion in this administration, one of whose greatest mistakes was to allow the mass movement that brought it to power to wither away. The people must be enlisted in the construction of the new economy, and here progressives have a lot to learn from the Tea Party movement that they must inevitably compete against in a life-and-death struggle for grassroots America."