Michael Lind: Offer Bolder Policies
[Michael Lind is the policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and the co-author of “The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics.”]
If he wants to limit the damage done to his presidency and the Democratic Party by a voter backlash in November, President Obama has a choice of three messaging strategies. Two of them will not work.
The first strategy is a message of “stay the course.” President Reagan’s stay-the-course message helped to limit the damage that Congressional Republicans suffered in the midterm elections in the depth of the recession of 1982. But by then it was clear that inflation, the No. 1 problem, had been broken and the worst was over. No such sense of improvement exists today. Stay-the-course will not work....
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If he wants to limit the damage done to his presidency and the Democratic Party by a voter backlash in November, President Obama has a choice of three messaging strategies. Two of them will not work.
The first strategy is a message of “stay the course.” President Reagan’s stay-the-course message helped to limit the damage that Congressional Republicans suffered in the midterm elections in the depth of the recession of 1982. But by then it was clear that inflation, the No. 1 problem, had been broken and the worst was over. No such sense of improvement exists today. Stay-the-course will not work....