Obama and the Virtues of ‘Politicking’ by E.J. Dionne, Jr. makes exactly the point that I have been trying to make on my Politics Blog since the very beginning.

As applied to the current administration, he says:

But Obama and his party are also in a hole because the president has chosen not to engage the nation in an extended dialogue about what holds all his achievements together, or why his attitude toward government makes more sense than the scattershot conservative attacks on everything Washington might do to improve the nation’s lot.

Later on in the article, Dionne said:

Obama’s mistake is captured by that disdainful reference to ‘politicking.’ In a democracy, separating governing from ‘politicking’ is impossible. ‘Politicking’ is nothing less than the ongoing effort to persuade free citizens of the merits of a set of ideas, policies and decisions. Voters feel better about politicians who put what they are doing in a compelling context. Citizens can endure setbacks as long as they believe the overall direction of the government’s approach is right.

This is a great post.  This is the point I have been trying to make all over the place.  E.J. Dione has a better platform for saying this than I do with my measly blog that only has 16,000 readers.

President Obama seemed to understand this so well during the campaign.  I am somewhat disappointed that he didn’t continue after the campaign.

Democrats think that once they explain something that the world will “note and long remember”.  The Republicans on the other hand seem to know that they have to keep pounding the message relentlessly.

Maybe the Democrats fallaciously think the truth does not have to be repeated.  It has to be repeated at least as often as the lies arrayed against it.

Robert Reich writes on OpEdNews The Two Stories of This Terrible Economy, Yet Obama and the Dems Won’t Tell Theirs.

It’s not that big business and Wall Street are evil. It’s that they’re out to make as much money as possible which is what they’re set up to do. That’s why we need an activist government to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and protect the public from their excesses.

This is the kind of constructive criticism that is useful.

It doesn’t call the President names and attribute evil motives to him. It says what he is doing wrong and suggests a way to fix it.

It would be so nice if more of the authors on OpEdNews took a lesson from this post.

On Augist 26, on The Nightly Business Report, Susie Charib interviewed Mike Holland, director, The China Fund.  This interview was part of the show’s series on the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries.

One of Mike Holland’s first responses included the following:

The country’s stimulus program worked really, really well. They instituted theirs at the same time the U.S. instituted its stimulus program. Theirs caused a growth in the economy that up until this most recent quarter was growing about 12 percent a year. As you said, for a country that is now the second largest GDP in the world, this is no longer a tiny emerging country, economically.

For all of the people who say that Keynesian economics does not work, I wonder how they explain the fact that it works just as expected in China. If it works in China, what is so different about the United States that it wouldn’t work here?

Could it be that once the Republican’s get their hands on a stimulus plan and manage to shape it to their liking that it no longer works as well as it could? Why don’t Republicans want our economy to succeed? Why is it that certain facts about economics are just unacceptable to Republicans? Why do they reject reality?

Come November, should we replace some of the current realists in Congress with a few more Republicans from fantasy land?