Word: taxing
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...Watching the junior Senator from New York, I was of two minds. My high-minded policy brain was, of course, appalled. The gas-tax holiday was a scam. It had been tried at various times - Barack Obama had voted for a local version in the Illinois legislature - and prices never came down. The oil companies and gas-station owners simply pocketed the difference. Clinton's "responsible" version of the plan was also a scam. She wanted to pay for it with a "windfall profits" tax on the oil companies, but she had earlier, and more responsibly, called for the elimination...
...kind of thing I have seen "work" throughout my nearly 40-year career as a journalist, an era that coincided neatly with the rise of consultant-driven flummery: you could fool most of the people most of the time. For nearly 30 years, the Republican offer of tax breaks had trumped the Democratic offer of responsible budgeting, with the ironic exception of Bill Clinton's presidency. And while that offer still might work in a general election, it did not in the May 6 Democratic primaries...
...narrative. But, as we know, those sorts of bargains tend to end badly. In this case, the upper-crust liberals who seemed ready to flee Obama in Pennsylvania - the sort of people who would run out and buy a hybrid before they'd support a reduction in the gasoline tax - decided to vote their faith that Obama was running an honorable campaign rather than their fear that his membership in Jeremiah Wright's church would render him radioactive...
...with good reason. The formerly charismatic Obama had undergone a transformation of his own: from John F. Kennedy to Adlai Stevenson, from dashing rhetorician to good-government egghead. He derided the gas-tax holiday as the gimmick it was, gambling that Democrats would see through the ruse. He trudged through the Wright debacle, never allowing his impeccable disposition to slip toward anger or pettiness. On the Sunday before the primaries, he gave a dour, newsless interview to Tim Russert, enduring another 20 minutes of questions about the Reverend Wright. Meanwhile, Clinton was spiky and histrionic in her simultaneous duel with...
...Clinton's apparent loss of the nomination was a consequence of her campaign's incompetence, but it was also a result of her reliance on the same-old. The shameless populism that seemed a possible game changer to media observers, micro-ideas like the gas-tax holiday, the willingness to go negative - which Obama tried intermittently, in halfhearted reaction to Clinton's attacks - appeared very old and clichéd to Obama's legion of young supporters, who were the real game changers in this year of extraordinary turnouts. That, and the fact that Democrats have been the party...