Alienating Big Business From The Republicans

With the various big bailouts underway in D.C. at the moment, Obama looks like he is openly pandering to Big Business, and therefore trying to hammer a wedge between Big Business and the GOP. That effort will set up interesting clashes on Capitol Hill, since Big Business generally writes the checks for everything that happens there and will take umbrage if GOP obstruction works against its best interests.

Perhaps we are headed back to liberalism's Golden Age (1932-1980) when Big Business was generally allied with the Democrats, not the Republicans. Remember the 1940's, when Brown and Root, the predecessor to Halliburton, and the folks who underwrote LBJ's various campaigns, had hardly any need for Republican contacts at all?:

But Obama doesn't look like he's trying for 80 votes in the Senate anymore, as one of his aides once foolishly said earlier this month; he looks like he's wielding his electoral mandate for change, and he should. And he and his staff are mostly ignoring John Boehner's House Republicans, who seem determined to make their party irrelevant with their sloganeering and obstruction while the economy falls apart.

There was a little too much pandering to the CEOs for my taste, of course. I wasn't thrilled when Obama blamed the economy's troubles on "a sense of irresponsibility that prevailed from Wall Street to Washington" and then said the burden for recovery will fall on "executives and factory floor workers, educators and engineers, healthcare professionals and elected officials."

I'd like the burden to fall heaviest on those responsible for this mess, some of them probably in Obama's audience this morning. But that's not realistic politics.

After the speech, MSNBC's Pat Buchanan asked, "Was that Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan?" Buchanan tried to make the case that Obama's speech was "very conservative," because he also promised to root out government waste -- as though waste were a liberal value. But what Buchanan was really praising was Obama's Reaganesque grasp of politics and pageantry. He's trying to make Democrats the party of business and prosperity, and he looks like he's succeeding. It's going to be fun to watch the House Republicans now.

Meanwhile, this morning on Talk Radio, a rather defensive-sounding Rush Limbaugh was reiterating that he hopes Obama will fail, because "America succeeds when Liberalism fails."

This should be fun!