This one has to be read to be believed. In the pages of the New York Times, apparatchik/cheerleader Nate Cohn lays out the coming line of attack:
Just a few years ago, one could be forgiven for wondering whether the liberal agenda had run its course. With near-universal health care — the unfinished business of the 20th-century Democratic Party — enacted, there was no obvious next step in the party’s mission of expanding the safety net. The big Democratic policies yet to be fully addressed, like immigration overhaul and restrictions on carbon emissions, pitted the party’s new progressive constituencies against its traditional, white working-class base.
Yet in the months after last year’s midterm elections, a reinvigorated liberal agenda has started to emerge. Few of the pieces of this agenda were discussed in the 2012 presidential elections or last year’s midterms. But they have rapidly moved from various liberal intellectual publications into President Obama’s speeches and budget, as well as Hillary Clinton’s speeches.
The emerging Democratic agenda is meant to appeal to parents. The policies under discussion — paid family leave; universal preschool; an expanded earned-income tax credit and child tax credit; free community college and perhaps free four-year college in time — are intended both to alleviate the burdens on middle-class families and to expand educational opportunity for children. The result is a thematic platform addressing some of the biggest sources of anxiety about the future of the middle class.
Read that last paragraph again. What Cohn is saying is that the way to help the “middle class” is essentially to put them on a new welfare scheme that subsidizes their lifestyles. Free!
The emerging Democratic agenda is meant to appeal to parents. The policies under discussion — paid family leave; universal preschool; an expanded earned-income tax credit and child tax credit; free community college and perhaps free four-year college in time — are intended both to alleviate the burdens on middle-class families and to expand educational opportunity for children. The result is a thematic platform addressing some of the biggest sources of anxiety about the future of the middle class.
It’s far too early to know how these themes will resonate with voters, or even the extent to which Mrs. Clinton will emphasize this agenda, but it does have the potential to give the Democrats a more coherent message for the middle class than the party had in 2014 or even 2012.
“Service journalism” at its finest! And you just know the lefties at the Times just love servicing the Democrats.
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