Truer Words Never Spoken

The other day Josh Marshall had a reader write in and describe the challenge President-elect Obama is going to face with the media and ultimately right wing pundits. I've read the excerpt a hundred times and I'm convinced it's the best summation of our current political discourse I've ever read.

From TPM:

From the WashPost homepage comes a vivid illustration of the opportunities and challenges facing the new administration:

"Adviser's Plan Would Alter Financial System: A top Obama adviser proposes measures that would dramatically expand government control over the free market in the United States."

The article itself details a report from a Group of 30 panel chaired by Paul Volcker, not from the Transition. It does, indeed, call for a thorough regulatory overhaul, including limiting the size of banks so they won't be too big to fail. But the entire point of the report is that we presently do not have a functioning free market. Insisting upon transparency, accountability, and oversight is the necessary precondition for restoring the health of the free market.

I expect this kind of distortion from AEI and Cato. But the panicked press reaction to this proposal helps explain why Obama seems so intent on retaining the capacity to communicate directly with the public. Even with the financial world teetering on the brink, the prospect of Change is deeply frightening to its denizens. This is going to get interesting.

Absolutely correct. There is nothing to suggest that we currently have a laissez faire system. That ended a long time ago. We can dream all day long about how capitalism is the greatest thing ever but our system is anything but unregulated. No one did more to regulate socialize our system than George Bush. But he gets off the hook. It will be Obama the media and the right wing will paint as "dramatically expand[ing] government control over the free market in the United States." That's such a lie. George Bush can nationalize entire industries but never gets a headline inferring the socialist takeover of our economy. Obama has a transition team that wants to increase transparency and accountability and he's expanding government into our free market system.?. There is no free market system. It's long gone. No one deserves more credit for it than George Bush. Welcome to reality people.