Selling spending as investment
It’s only been a year or so that America was re-branded. Now the Politico explains how big spending is being re-branded by President Obama’s polling operation:
Obama…is polling more than Bush – a bit less than once a week for most of his young term, two people involved said. Elements of Obama’s approach bear the hallmarks of message testing, like the introduction of the words “recovery” and “reinvestment” to rebrand the “stimulus” package, and aides said the polling has focused almost entirely on selling policy, not on measuring the president’s personal appeal. A source familiar with the data said a central insight of more recent polling had been that Americans see no distinction between the budget and the popular spending measures that preceded it, and that the key to selling the budget has been to portray it as part of the “recovery” measures.
“Americans see no difference between the budget and the popular spending measures that preceded it.” Such a sorry state of affairs. Welcome to sub-prime and credit-card America, where the majority is apparently too clueless to know the imprudence of the administration’s amazing spending plans. What will they say when the bill comes due?
When you think about it, the Obama budget is being sold just like all those sub-prime mortgages were sold to the unwitting and the willfully complicit — it’s a version of “no income verification” on a global scale. The consequences of such practices are now well known, but apparently no one cares while the party’s going on.