It isn’t just Segolene Royal in France who is touting a far-left domestic agenda. Barack Obama has declaimed (David Frum’s word):
Let’s be the generation that ends poverty in America. Every single person willing to work should be able to get job training that leads to a job, and earn a living wage that can pay the bills, and afford child care so their kids have a safe place to go when they work. Let’s do this.
Frum demonstrates the astonishing lack of realsim in this pronouncement and others by the same candidate.
Our politics are not conducive to Obama’s sort of utopian vision, thank God. But conditions are now aligned in such a way that it’s not surprising to hear this talk coming from a reasonably credible presidential candidate. First, the Democratic party is becoming unabashedly leftist again. Second, the Republican party looks weak. Third, the economy is booming. The last time we had conditions something like these, we got Lyndon Johnson’s ill-fated and probably counter-productive War on Poverty/Great Socity. So I guess it could happen again.
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