Americans want to know that their elected leaders care more about their upward mobility than fighting inequality. They want to know that elected officials are more preoccupied with their job prospects than with climate change. Progressives have repeatedly failed to track with the mainstream on these and other concerns, and voters have noticed.
President Obama’s call to a just economy in his speech last night only reinforced this incongruity. He called for “a new social compact to guarantee all our kids the education they need. To give workers the power to unionize for better wages. To update the social safety net to reflect the way we live now. And [to] make more reforms to the tax code so corporations and the individuals who reap the most from this new economy don’t avoid their obligations to the country that’s made their very success possible.”
But the new social compact sounds too much like the old social compact that has characterized the Obama economy: an overly regulated marketplace in which workers lack either the skills for today’s economy or the proper incentives to find work in the first place.
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