Richard Wolffe Accuses Mitt Romney Of Having An Economic ‘Pre-9/11 Mindset’

During a discussion of President Obama‘s remarks on the June jobs report, in which he called out Republicans for failing to move on jobs legislation, MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolffe referred to the Great Recession as an “economic 9/11,” and accused Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney of wanting “to go back to a pre-economic meltdown, a pre-9/11 mindset.”

Guest host Michael Eric Dyson teed Wolffe up by asking him “Richard, have Republicans boxed in President Obama by preventing any jobs legislation from passing?”

“They have,” Wolffe said, “and they have from the start, but you know, you get tactical success, that doesn’t mean that you’re dealing with the problems you’re elected to solve, or in fact that you’re going to win strategically in political terms.”

Wolffe then drew a comparison between the economic crisis, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, noting the stark contrast in the way the opposition parties reacted in each case.

“At this point,” he

added, “you have a candidate who is bound by the same misjudgments, a candidate who wants to go back to a pre-economic meltdown, a pre-9/11 mindset, which is to pretend like it never happened and say we can go back to a time where the banks were all great, and you could deregulate, and everything would be fine. We live in this post-meltdown world, and that mindset of obstructionism or pretending it never happened is not going to convince the voters in November.”

Professor Dyson said, “Isn’t it even worse, given your analysis regards the ostrich in the ground, we know that don’t do that, but for metaphor’s sake, let’s continue that, in 9/11, the one that occurred, Americans came together and joined together across party lines. This is the bitter division of a kind of refusal to get together and unify, the very language that the Republicans have often thrust upon ‘non-patriotic progressives.’ Isn’t this something of a contradiction here?”

“It absolutely is,” Wolf replied. “It’s a failure of public duty, most of all. You don’t need the fingers on one hand to count the number of Republicans who voted for the Recovery Act. There had been a long track record of people from both parties saying in times of recession, we need stimulus spending, this was a crisis, a

global crisis that started in this country, and there was a refusal to engage.”

“I understand why Republicans were shy about that,” Wolffe added. “They thought that the top vote to bail out the banks was terrible. Everyone did, but in the end, the banks survived because of that, the auto industry survived because of that. Looking back, no matter what their position was to begin with, no matter what heat they took, if you’re in public office, you have to say you’re going to do things for the public good.”

While Wolffe’s metaphor is emotionally fraught, it does illustrate an intriguing strategic possibility for President Obama. In 2004, when the danger was terrorism, people didn’t feel safe, and George W. Bush was able to take advantage of that by portraying John Kerry, or really any other president, as a risk to the progress that had been made, the old “changing horses in mid-stream” argument.

While President Obama has continued to tout the progress the economy has made in the past 28 months, that sentence usually ends with something like “but it’s not enough.” There’s a conservative (as in risk-avoiding) argument to be made that any change could jeopardize the progress that has been made, let alone a change to a candidate whose policy ideas mirror those that caused the crisis in the first place.

My metaphor

is that of a contractor who has to fix a house that’s on fire. You’re glad he put the fire out, and you might wish he was getting the rebuilding job done faster, but you’d never fire him in favor of the guy with a gas can and a blowtorch.

Here’s the clip, from The Ed Show:

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