Who's Serious Now?

From the New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman weights in on the President's speech from last Wednesday:

Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that the proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.

On Wednesday, as I said, the president called Mr. Ryan’s bluff: after offering a spirited (and reassuring) defense of social insurance, he declared, “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.” Actually, the Ryan plan calls for $2.9 trillion in tax cuts, but who’s counting?

And

And the hissy fit — I mean, criticism — the Obama plan provoked from Mr. Ryan was deeply revealing, as the man who proposes using budget deficits as an excuse to cut taxes on the rich accused the president of being “partisan.” Mr. Ryan also accused the president of being “dramatically inaccurate” — this from someone whose plan included a $200 billion error in its calculation of interest costs and appears to have made an even bigger error on Medicaid costs. He didn’t say what the inaccuracies were.

More here.

As much as I like to hear the President speaking this way, I'm very wary. After all, such spirited defense of liberal values coming from Obama over the last couple of years has been, at best, tepid. And I'm just talking about the rhetoric; when it comes to actual deeds, he's thrown liberal values under the bus pretty much every time the opportunity has presented itself.

It is impossible not to observe that he announced his campaign plans for a second term only last week: the cynic in me says that he's now in major damage control mode regarding his relationship with liberals, the so-called Democratic base. I mean, without them, he stands absolutely no chance of winning, and he's trashed them time and again. Time to make nice, I guess.

So I'm not really buying it. He's going to have to make his words match his actions before I'm even going to consider voting for him. As far as I can tell, he's still the same conservative pro-corporate Democrat that he was last month. And his uplifting groovy vibes continue to be, at this point, nothing more than the same campaign strategy he used in 2008 to hoodwink America's left. I mean, he didn't hoodwink me. I voted for Nader, a real lefty. But he did get most liberals on board with all his hope and change bullshit, and I fear that these people are just as susceptible to sweet talk as they were three years ago. I guess we'll see.

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