Via Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, who's put together a nice series of clips and quotes on the theme "The Democratic brand is toxic right now."This is a theme that gets my tag "Democratic Party in Trumpland."BUT: Really, the problem Klein chuckles over pre-dates the Trump era. It's the failure of the Obama agenda: "The stimulus bill under Obama — that had 3 big headline projects for reinvestment. It had high speed rail. It had smart grid. And it had a nation wide system of inter-operable health records.... 0 for 3."Ezra Klein explains how it feels to be a Democrat in under 30 seconds:
— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 26, 2025
Ezra Klein: "The stimulus bill under Obama, that had 3 big headline projects for reinvestment.
High speed rail, smart grid, a nation wide system of interoperable health records. 0 for 3"
Gavin Newsom: "I… pic.twitter.com/Rlq1z8fGRb
March 30, 2025
"At some point, we gotta be upset about this," says Ezra Klein, nervously chuckling.
Yeah? What point?!
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42 comments:
But the Dems won’t be. For them, it was about appearances and Barack was the cool and historic Black President.
Funny that Gavin is laughing about the failure to build high-speed rail.
The Dems consider themselves the best and the brightest. If true, why do they fail at everything?
Your problem isn’t your policies or your failure to execute them. You have a messaging problem. Get better at messaging…
…for example, your own leftie pollsters say nearly 80 percent of those polled approve of targeting government waste but it as Chuck Schumer says you’re picking away at Trump’s approval rating. If you just keep up with the hate and vitriol ad destruction of private property you’ll get Trump’s approval to something your own media outlets can be proud of…
why do they fail at everything?
Talkers, not doers. They confuse speech with action.
i thought that the agenda of the three O'Bama terms,
was to cripple the country with ruinous debt and social division.
It seems to me; that the O'Bama terms succeeded (in their agenda), better than ANY Presidency in History.
Just LOOK at what they accomplished!
Look back, at 2007; and compare those Golden Days, to the shattered ruin of a country we have now.
Their objective is to weigh down any goal with graft, not to actually accomplish anything, because then the money would dry up. They do this with issues, too. They never codified Roe into law because then they wouldn’t have an issue to rile up women voters. It’s all about money and power for themselves, not about serving the American citizens.
Finally, more people are seeing this fact more broadly.
Is Ezra reaching for the red pill?
The O'Bama years have always been "all hat no cattle."
It's. A. Jobs. Program. For. The. Surplus. Elites.
You wanted results? These ARE the results. Fill out this form and get back to us. We'll put our best people on this for you. They all have the finest credentials and degrees from the best institutions.
Honest. Oh, or just go with your "common sense". Next thing, you'll be watering your plants with that stuff in your toilet.
…but Democrats love hat…
Shovel ready projects if I recall. My dog left some shovel ready projects in my backyard for Obama.
It makes all the sense in the world:
BIG Zer0 was 0 for 3.
"The stimulus bill under Obama — that had 3 big headline projects for reinvestment."
What was done to implement these? Leftist think waving the magic wand of government makes things so, but passing legislation is the easy part.
Government is inefficient and corrupt by its very nature. The best model for having any success is for government to get out of the way and empower the private sector to achieve its goals. That's not impossible, but it is incredibly difficult and requires leadership, not showmanship.
I think the https://www.epic.com/ is pretty good for patient record interoperability, but they are commercial and not government.
One of the 'tells' of Democrat rhetoric is calling slush-fund spending "reinvestment." It was never "Investment" to begin with, as there's never any "return" with which to calculate the ROI; it's just spending money. And adding "re" in front of "Investment" doesn't make it any more sensible as a use of public money, either; it can't be "re-whatever" if it wasn't "whatever" from the start. Pure con-man word games.
The problem is the Government is not designed to build or make or invent directly. At best the Government can incentivize certain outcomes by relaxing regulatory burdens and decreasing taxes in a way designed to produce those outcomes. If you want high speed rail, remove the regulatory restrictions and provide tax incentives for companies to build the trains. The Democrats don’t like deregulation and tax reduction, so they will never do this.
Robert Marshall--Bingo.
It is the same with the "Infrastructure" BS (Which Trump does as well). We "need" hundreds of billions of new spending for "infrastructure." It gets authorized and goes into the same sinkhole as most government spending.
"Infrastructure" is one of the core things that our tax dollars should be going to. It should not require "new" spending or programs.
@Dave Begley: "The Dems consider themselves the best and the brightest. If true, why do they fail at everything? "
What makes you think that they think they're failing?
Are the key members of the Democrat leadership getting any poorer? They're out of power, sure - for now. But the numbers aren't that far out. It's the Republicans that won't shut up about how far out-of-touch the Democrats are, how miserable are their prospects, how wonderful for Republicans.
It smells like the same old bullsh*t. Republicans can win, when the voters insist, but they don't know how to consolidate wins and hold on to power. We'll be seeing a victory lap for 2 years. What has Congress accomplished? They've been in session almost 3 months now. The only one making headway is Trump and DOGE.
If Obama's agenda was to build 3 things, then a failure as noted. If the agenda was to build a continuing revenue stream for his party, then mission accomplished.
Obama cared more about funding Iran.
Deliverables, never show up from lefty promises.
All sizzle, no steak (for you peasants) should be their theme.
Click the link Ann provides, and read the screen shots of Matthew Yglesias.
I think Matthew is the backbone of the left. He demands All-lies and open deceit - right there out in the open.
And yet - with all of the left's absolute waste of OUR money - the hive-mind MSNBC poisoned left HATE Musk and his team for trying to clean up the mess.
One might think that at some point, they need to extract their heads from their asses… but NOOOO!!!
No hat, all bullschiff.
If these two guys are so smart, why is the party they lead lying in tatters?
I would like to see Ezra follow up those thoughts with some reporting line was done with Biden broadband initiative. How much of the money allocated for the three projects were spent and how.
Getting paid to talk is a tough addiction to break. Besides, actually doing something tangible - actually building or running something - is a lot of work, and they certainly didn't go into politics to do any real work.
Trump and his advisors have all but said, If a recession comes, so be it. We’re taking the shot and playing the long game. They’re ready to stomach short-term pain for a bigger payoff down the line. I agree pain’s coming, but I doubt it’ll pass as quickly as they suggest. If they’re headed where I suspect, this could be a once-in-a-generation retooling of the global economy.
This isn’t just Trump’s play, though. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act banked on green re-industrialization; Trump’s pushing tariffs and a carbon-heavy model. Both are chasing goals bigger than local patches or Social Security tweaks. I’m no Biden defender—he said his vision would take decades. Trump’s trying to ram it through in an hour and a half. His plan risks shattering plenty, and executing this shift is brutal—yet they’re dead serious. America’s done scribbling IOUs to the world; now it’s making everyone else recalibrate. That’s the US’s edge: it can offload the hurt.
Normally, a recession here brings federal relief to dull the edge. With this crew? Don’t bet on it. Their agenda—juiced by DOGE’s cuts and massive tax breaks—leaves no fiscal safety net. If the economy tanks, nothing slows the plunge. Could that pain unravel Trump’s team politically? Maybe. Take Social Security: Roosevelt made it contributory, thinking it untouchable. Slash it, or gut Medicaid, to fund tax cuts while firing IRS collectors? That’s a rough sell. Convincing people this mess is a noble global reordering for America’s sake? Even rougher. It all ties into the austerity Elon Musk and his allies push—cut, cut, cut—with Trump right behind them.
And austerity? It’s synonymous with recession—you can’t have one without the other. It’s baked into their direction. The last big downturn, 2008-2009, left scars that lingered a decade or more, as economists have noted. If this one’s worse than the Great Recession — what does that mean for the next 10, 15, 20 years?
It means recovery’s a slog. The Great Recession taught us that. Skills atrophy, fear stalls investment. No one spends in a downturn; when investment dries up, the spiral deepens. Digging out is brutal—and if the state won’t step in, if they’re saying ‘bring it on’ to break and purge the system, it’s a gamble. The world splits here: some say an economy in free-fall needs the state to hit the brakes, or it’s a one-way drop. Others argue breaking it all sparks massive growth after. We're making a bet one way or the other that that's going to be what's happening.
"At some point, we gotta be upset about this" Althouse asks: what point? Answer: at the point Dems are out of power and their gravy train stops. Then they have reason to fake being "upset." Until they are back in power, the gravy train rides again, and they can use government to their advantage, results be damned.
If anyone would like a better understanding of the Trump administration's approach, you should read Stephen Miran’s “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System”. Miran is chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.
I've said this before: the Democrats can't emerge from this until the rank-and-file goes after the "Democrats" who promoted Trump as a disruptive force in 2015-16. They're the same people who fixed things against Bernie in 2016 and 2020, who stopped contested Dem primaries in 2024, and swapped Biden out for Harris.
It's occurred to me recently that this is what Trump, Musk, & Co. are doing right now - denying thosr Dem power brokers their patronage and funding sources. Ironically, it's the best thing for the Dem rank-and-file.
Bush did not leave this country in very good shape in 2008. Those were no Golden Days. Most of the recent damage was done in the Biden years. Obama was an empty suit and something of a fraud. There was much undermining from within going on during his administration, but the outward condition of the country wasn't worse off when Obama left office than it was when he became president. Was a chance for racial harmony missed? That was never in the Democrats' playbook.
Kakistocracy:
Marvellous criticism of President Hoover, but not very relevant to what's going on now.
it wasn't a failure, everyone that mattered got paid, the actual stated goal, well that doesn't matter
Lazarus, not even remotely true with respect to Healthcare costs.
In 2016, Trump opponents could realistically argue that Trump grifted a freak win without majority support because of the quirks of the electoral college and the fly-over frustrations of blue collar rustbelt men who frequented diners. (Cue the sub-genre of newspaper and magazine articles by journalists who visited said diners in a baffled exercise in political anthropology.)
This time, Trump won the popular vote, along with both houses of Congress. He received 43% of the vote in blue NJ and NY and 45% in blue Illinois. That is a pretty significant level of national support. So what would the ‘resistance’ be protesting about this time? “You voters got it wrong,” is not a smart placard message right at the start of a new administration.
One of the most mystifying aspects of American politics is the Democrats’ bizarre aversion to enforcing the national border. It is equally as unusual as the Republicans’ ultra-permissive stance on guns and the extremism on both sides about abortion. No other country has these sort of heated, never-ending debates about stuff that has been settled for decades elsewhere.
Yes, as said above the purpose of the Democratic Party is to give top 5% jobs to their unemployable surplus elites. You can’t throw a beer can without hitting a wife, son, or daughter of a federal judge who gets $800kpy from a government funded ngo.
But what is funny, is when they actually pass something that is supposed to help working people you find a year later that, sorry all that money we passed out went to lawyers and our families, and there is sadly nothing left for you.
All this secret funding of overpaid elitists needs to be destroyed.
The senate fillibuster is holding America hostage to the most ignorant person among the 100 most contemptible people on earth. Although the filibuster is good in some ways, it needs to go.
I heard Klein and his co-writer on another podcast. At The Free Press, I believe. Their problem is, they see this type of administration as a feature, not a bug. They want the government over producing and pushing our money to more and more people to get to "Abundance." MOAR government!
"One of the most mystifying aspects of American politics is the Democrats’ bizarre aversion to enforcing the national border."
Jesus. Really? The democrats are importing voters. They already gain advantage by pumping up their electoral college and congressional representation numbers. Granting citizenship to 20 million illegals will be the mother lode.
It's as plain as the nose on your face, bright guy.
The Obama stimulus bill, just like the Biden Inflation Reduction Act, were not meant to produce anything except payments to Democrat supporters, creating funding mechanisms through government largesse that would pay Democrats and their supporters in perpetuity. Here's hoping DOGE roots that grifting operation out entirely and does its best to prevent same in future.
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