President Obama said at a private fundraiser in Chicago Thursday night that the Left’s progressive agenda features no “radical” qualities, and is in fact entirely reasonable across the board.
Using Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), both in attendance, as examples of Democrats and their platform being totally mainstream, the president said that his party’s ideas had simply fallen victim to stubborn resistance from the Right.
“The problem is not that the Democrats are overly ideological — because the truth of the matter is, is that the Democrats in Congress have consistently been willing to compromise and reach out to the other side,” Obama said, according to a transcript of his remarks. “There are no radical proposals coming out from the left.”
He then began to list specific issues one-by-one. In parentheses next to these issues are proposals that some might construe as “radical.”
“When we talk about climate change, we talk about how do we incentivize through the market greater investment in clean energy.” (Cap-and-trade, battering the coal industry, regulating energy at a torrid clip.)
“When we talk about immigration reform there’s no wild-eyed romanticism. We say we’re going to be tough on the borders …” (Except not really.)
“When we talk about taxes we don’t say we’re going to have rates in the 70 percent or 90 percent when it comes to income like existed here 50, 60 years ago. We say let’s just make sure that those of us who have been incredibly blessed by this country are giving back to kids …” (Fair, in that at no point has the administration embraced reverting to the embarrassingly high federal income tax rates of administrations long past — but instead of pursuing comprehensive tax reform that would truly make the system fairer, its wide-ranging, ambitious tax policy is “The Buffett Rule.”
“Health care — we didn’t suddenly impose some wild, crazy system.” (It certainly has run wild, and driven people crazy, to boot. Really crazy.)
“So when you hear a false equivalence that somehow, well, Congress is just broken, it’s not true,” the president continued. “What’s broken right now is a Republican Party that repeatedly says no to proven, time-tested strategies to grow the economy, create more jobs, ensure fairness, open up opportunity to all people.”
OK.
