Marketplace of Ideas Blog

By now, readers are used to criticism of President Obama from the right side of the political spectrum — those who feel the federal government is spending and regulating too much, is going into too much debt, and is about to tax too much.

But Obama’s critics are not just on his right side. Forbes.com’s Joel Kotkin looks at Obama’s supporters-turned-critics:

To date, the administration has listed toward the agenda of what may be best described as the left’s gentry wing. These include activists at universities, urban planners and liberal nonprofits, many of whom see in Obama’s pro-green policies and multicultural agenda the fulfillment of their long-time fantasies.

This, at times, puts them at odds with large parts of the middle- and working-class base of the Democratic Party. The administration’s plans to “coerce” people out of their cars for the alleged good of the environment probably does not offer much “hope” for those working at auto plants. Highly dependent as they are on stocks and asset inflation for their income, the gentry are not likely to object to the administration’s coddling of large financial institutions.

Then there is the party’s populist contingent, whose inspiration comes more from FDR and Harry Truman than from the likes of Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi. They are less likely to see much of a difference between a Timothy Geithner or a Hank Paulson. To them, the two Treasury secretaries have both been useful servants for the nation’s “economic royalists.”

The “middle- and working-class base of the Democratic Party” delivered a lot of votes to Republicans starting in 1980 largely on values issues where the Democrats were seen as way to the left of the mainstream. Bill Clinton managed to recapture them in the 1990s by portraying himself as, while certainly not a Republican, not one of those silly left-wing Dumocrats in Congress either. A lot of those voters then went back to the GOP after 9/11 because they perceived the Democrats were not serious about national security (which was the case in the 1980s as well), and then they went back to the Democrats in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

One wonders if Obama's health care crusade will be the next issue to push the great middle back rightward. At least at first, it appears to be the remake of HillaryCare, which torched Clinton's dreams of more than two years of Democratic control of the White House and Congress. It happened to make Clinton a better president because it forced him to make deals on such subjects as investment tax breaks; he could simultaneously campaign against and work with the GOP-controlled Congress, and that was the story of Clinton's last six years in office.