Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Scott Brown: The Dim Paradox

After convincingly likening Sen. Scott Brown to the Tom Hanks character in Big, Noam Scheiber of The New Republic writes, "In his concerns, priorities, and, maybe most important, his confusion about the economy, Brown has come to represent the average voter in 2010."

"Perhaps most intriguingly of all, Brown has sometimes exploited anxiety about jobs as a reason to oppose … jobs-related legislation. In doing so, he’s picked up on a paradox that defines the political zeitgeist: Even though Americans are more concerned about jobs than anything else, they don’t seem to appreciate the factors that help create them. In the same NBC poll in which voters overwhelmingly say jobs should be the government’s top priority, they also say, by nearly a two-to-one margin, that they’d prefer the government attend to the deficit even if it delays the economic recovery. So, according to the poll, voters care much more about jobs than the deficit, but much more about the deficit than the economy. Where exactly are the jobs supposed to come from?"

Posted via email from liberalsarecool.com

No comments: