This Politico article by Alexander "L'il Monty" Burns is pitch-perfect for what it is, namely, smug self-serving elitist anti-democratic snobbery masquerading as commentary. In its profound shallowness, this may indeed be at once the most obnoxious and wrong articles ever published in The Politico, which means its author deserves some sort of prize, like being pelted with garbage, dirt-clods, and slugs.
It was supposed to be one of the clearest messages of the 2010 elections: Voters were finally fed up with government spending.
It felt like the usual rules had changed, and that Americans were worried enough about the size of government to support a new era of belt-tightening. They wanted leaders to make the tough choices – and would stick by the ones who did.
Now, a new wave of polling has challenged that consensus, raising serious questions about whether voters really are yearning for a grown-up conversation about the cost of government — or would simply rather keep punting the problem down the road, just like in the past.
Almost every governor who’s tried to deliver a take-your-medicine message has paid a price. And widespread polling data suggests a chasm between what Americans say they want and the price they’re prepared to pay to get there.
Burns finds it especially galling that America's "icon of fiscal austerity," Chris Christie, is down 10 points in some polls.
The idea that Christie is any such thing is perfectly ludicrous, of course, measured by any yardstick but right-wing dogma and insider-media doxa. Rejecting federal money that would create jobs, union-baiting, and not raising taxes on millionaires: that's playing to the elite base, not cojones.
Anyway the idea that voters were fed up with "government spending" is absurd. Voters were fed up with nasty unemployment rates, which were caused by the housing market disaster, which was not caused by public employee unions, but was caused by the same right-wing ideologues who are now pretending to care about "deficits" and are for reasons of abject sycophancy abetted by Politico-class "journalists" who would get the vapors over the suggestion that the actual perpetrators of the Great Recession, who are not elementary school teachers but wealthy assholes up to whom Politico-class "journalists" delightedly suck, get tossed in jail where they belong.
But you knew that. The more comical bit of the article is how Burns concedes that raising taxes might be on occasion wise or necessary, but fails to acknowledge that the GOP governers he slobbers over would never consider such anti-religious heresy.
The nastier bit of the article is the sneering condescension directed at voters who disagree with Burns' version of reality, despite its inconsistencies and dubiousness.
The most depressing bit is, every Democrat of any influence in the party right now fully subscribes to this horseshit.