It was a terrible week for the good guys. First, job numbers that
were awful enough to indicate a bad trend, anemic growth at best. Then a
shellacking in Wisconsin, that proved the public’s diminished support
for civil service unions, a core Democratic constituency. And finally,
the inexplicable news conference in which President Obama declared the “private sector is doing just fine.”
The economy is in dire straits: It needs a demand stimulus and will
not be rescued by a China, whose own growth has flat-lined, or a Europe
on the verge of catastrophe.
Meanwhile, Democratic politics have pretty much devolved into attacks
on either Mitt Romney or Scott Walker. The apparent absence of genuine
hope right now has serious consequences for the viability of the
president’s argument that he is the voice of the future. His politics
look more and more like the old-fashioned slash-and-burn of years past.
