Teachers, public employees and retirees have been chumped by…
“In other words, if you are a liberal—a member of the Democratic ‘base’—you just got played,” writes Thomas Frank, columnist for Harper’s Magazine and a book reviewer for bookforum.com.
In his review of the new book by Jonathan Alter, The Center Holds, Frank discovers some direct evidence of this. The book is not Fox News hate mongering. As a matter of fact, “His framework is simple: to lionize Barack Obama and to slag his ‘enemies’ in the Republican Party… As a result, the book feels intensely and even embarrassingly partisan.”
Prior to the 2012 election, the Obama team felt a very real need to regain his voter base that had been deteriorating. “’Reenergizing the base was tough,’ Alter writes. Fortunately, however, Obama got an assist in this task from right-wing governors such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio, whose wars on public-employee unions and their pensions ‘proved to be powerful motivators for the base.’ Clever Obama
