Thomas Frank delivers himself of the usual progressive advice to Barack Obama in the pages of the WSJ:
What you need to do now is pick a fight, preferably one that forces the obstructionists of the right to take the side of privilege. You need a battle that will expose their populism and their protest for the pretenses they are. Your target is obvious: the financial industry, from Wall Street to the credit card companies. Yes, taking them on will cost you campaign contributions for 2012, but take Wall Street down a few pegs and Americans might start to remember what it was their grandparents loved about Democrats all those years ago.
In all my years of reading right-wing punditry I have never heard any of the groups conventionally deemed to be the go-to scapegoats of the right (ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, welfare recipients) or even Al-Qaeda denounced as readily and unashamedly as progressives gleefully demagogue banks and the rich. Much less have I read in any respectable publication that the soundest strategic counsel to the Right would be to focus public scorn on a particular despised minority and ride the wave of hatred to electoral success.
Yet, progressives like Mr. Frank do so shamelessly and will at the same time claim the mantle of dispassionate reason and adopt an attitude of vast superiority to the slavering Republican-voting hordes with their hate-filled minds.
How does that work?
