Obama's Anti-Bank Rhetoric Fails in Massachusetts

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Obama's Anti-Bank Rhetoric Fails in Massachusetts
Howard Richman, 1/20/2010

Just before yesterday's Massachusetts election, President Obama tried to skewer Republican candidate Scott Brown for opposing a just-proposed $9 billion tax on some banks. President Obama was trying to save the U.S. Senate seat for the Democrats through populist rhetoric. Blomberg reported:

“Bankers don’t need another vote in the United States Senate -- they’ve got plenty,” Obama said in Boston, signaling a broader political strategy to tie Republicans in this year’s races to Wall Street greed.

But it didn't work. Scott Brown,the Republican candidate in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, still won an overwhelming victory. Obama's attempt to paint Brown as a Wall Street lackey failed because the voters knew that Obama is the phony populist, while Brown is the real thing. Brown is a man of the people who serves in the National Guard and drives a pick-up truck. To Obama, the American pick-up truck is a clunker that should be scrapped.

Obama thinks that typical Americans are motivated by a desire to see the rich hurt. But typical Americans don't hate bankers; they oppose handouts to Wall Street because they understand corrupt pay-offs to campaign contributors. They aren't the frustrated hatemongers of Obama's mind when he reportedly told his contributors at an April 2008 San Francisco fundraiser:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The Scott Browns of America will eventually figure out how to bring back American manufacturing jobs. But the Obamas of the world will never understand them.