Obama bites rich hands that fed him
 Excerpt - see link for details. | In 2008, exit polls showed the percentage of voters earning more than $100,000 had jumped to a historic high of 26 percent, compared with just 9 percent in 1996. Obamas strong showing among this bloc reversed a decades-old pattern in which the more money someone made, the more likely he or she was to vote Republican.
But these voters are not being repaid for their support more like the other way around.
Beyond the obviously wealthy voters, people who in many places are no more than upper middle class find themselves targeted to pay for a wide range of Obama policies aimed at leveling the economic playing field.
The notion that people who are in those income brackets are Republican isnt true anymore, said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. In part, he added, thats because of the way they made their money in high-tech, legal or service professions that skew liberal, rather than through traditional Main Street businesses that skew conservative.
Obamas gamble that he can ask affluent progressives to pay more without complaint has been made riskier by the collapse of home prices and stock portfolios. Many well-to-do voters who may have been in a magnanimous frame of mind when they cast their ballots last November are not nearly so rich now.
If Obama comes down more heavily on them, how will they react? Will their support fade? We dont know the answers, said Mark Penn, a Democratic strategist who conducted polling for the Clinton White House and advised Hillary Clinton in the presidential campaign.
Obamas mild rhetoric about asking, in some cases, those who are more fortunate ... to pay a little bit more hardly constitutes class warfare to most middle-earning Americans. Whats more, he has delayed by a year his proposal to raise top rates back to their Clinton-era levels.
But within Obamas policies there is a notable degree of class-consciousness and a consistent strategy to target the costs and limit the benefits of Obamas program for upper earners.
Posted by: Seafarious 2009-05-06 |