The Ignorant Investor

So says liberal blogger Digby in a post today, pointing to the idea that Obama wants to make a bargain with Republicans on entitlements to cut the deficit:

I've been writing about the Grand Bargain since the minute I read about it before the inauguration. It struck me as a perfect illustration of Obama's stated desire to "bring people together" by killing liberalism as we've known it. Others have recently been revisiting the topic since Obama's fabulous success in extending the Bush tax cuts in exchange for the Republicans agreeing to do what they were already going to do.

Opinions differ among left-wingers about exactly what Obama is doing up there on his giant perch in the clouds, but it's hard to understand why Obama always seems ready to offer huge concessions to Republicans while expecting something in return. Surely he knows by now that deficit reduction isn't a real issue for republicans. Only preserving tax cuts.

Obama has done a terrible job of explaining to Americans why liberal policies work. What they've done for the middle class, how they help economic development, what the ramifications are for eliminating programs. He can't be bother to argue about it and so falls back on the now ingrained beltway assumption that the public favors market-based unregulated competition as the default setting for social organization. It's like Obama's history books skipped the nearly all the 20th century and simply began with a section on how Ronald Reagan brought morning to America.