Obama Aide On Social Security Cut Story: It 'Overshoots The Runway' (UPDATED)

Obama Pushing For Cuts To Social Security, Medicare

How many people who voted for Obama in 2008 would have expected a headline like this a short two-and-a-­half years later?  Many more than should have.  As Matt Taibbi explains in trumpeting Frank Rich's superb new New York article detailing Obama's subservien­ce to Wall Street: 

Throughout 2008, it was hard to shake the feeling that this was a politician whose legacy could still go either way. There were an awful lot of troubling signs on the horizon in Obama’s campaign, not the least of which being the enthusiast­ic support he was receiving from Wall Street.

Obama in part ran a very slightly economical­ly populist campaign, but the tens of millions pouring into his campaign coffers from the very rich (and specifical­ly from hedge funds) told all of us that we probably shouldn’t expect those promises to come off. For a piece I wrote that summer, I asked people in Washington why Wall Street would be throwing money at a guy who was out there on the stump pledging to reach into their pockets:

"Sadly, the answer to that question increasing­ly appears to be that Obama is, well, full of shit. . . . These populist pledges sound good, but many business moguls appear to be betting that the tax policies, like Obama himself, are only that: something that sounds good. 'I think we don't want to make too much of his promises on taxes,' says Robert Pollin, professor of economics at the University of Massachuse­tts. 'Not all of these things will happen.' Noting the overwhelmi­ng amount of Wall Street money pouring into Obama's campaign, even elitist fuckwad David Brooks was recently moved to write, "Once the Republican­s are vanquished­, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that capital-ga­ins tax hike."

Disgusting­ly, Brooks turned out to be right, and the narrative of the Obama presidency did end up turning sour, on that front anyway.

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