Posted by
Garnet92 on Wednesday, July 07, 2010 8:41:48 PM
There is a glimmer of hope, indeed a ray of sunshine, that shines through in this article in The Daily Beast about the Aspen Ideas Festival. Written by Lloyd Grove, it recounts that even though “the folks attending this cerebral conclave pairing the Aspen Institute think tank with the Atlantic Monthly magazine might even be seen as President Obama’s natural base,” all is not well.
They are [bites knuckle] questioning Obama’s economic “policy.”
Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson offered a withering critique of Obama’s economic policies and was joined by billionaire real estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman in lambasting Obama’s trillion-dollar deficit spending program as fiscally ruinous, potentially turning America into a second-rate power.
Zuckerman added that he detects in the Obama White House “hostility to the very kinds of [business] culture that have made this the great country that it is and was. I think we have to find some way of dealing with that or else we will do great damage to this country with a public policy that could ruin everything.”
This was greeted by hearty applause from a crowd that included Barbra Streisand and her husband James Brolin. “Depressing, but fantastic,” Streisand told me afterward, rendering her verdict on the session. “So exciting. Wonderful!” Brolin’s assessment: “Mind-blowing.”
The consensus was similar in an afternoon panel discussion on the decline of the American middle class. “He said jobs were going to be his No. 1 priority - there’s a huge disconnect between Washington and what’s going on out in the country,” nominal Obama supporter Arianna Huffington said. “The president’s economic team kept talking about a ‘cyclical’ problem. Larry Summers said jobs were a lagging economic indicator. All these things are simply wrong. The president put all his trust in the wrong economic team - an economic team that didn’t understand what was happening.”
Doesn’t it appear that some of them are (perhaps, maybe, finally) beginning to get it?
Here’s the link. (the download from the Beast site is slooowww)