The Corner

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The World According to Obama


The president’s remarks at a fundraiser last night, quoted at length by Greg Sargent, expressed the view of a lot of liberals quite well. For him, it is obvious, simply common sense, that we need to enact comprehensive immigration reform, impose sharp cuts to carbon emissions, crack down further on sex discrimination by employers, raise the minimum wage, and put more money into early childhood education; anyone who disagrees with these propositions is being ideologically rigid and unreasonable; and the press should make it clear that the Democrats are the party of common-sense compromise and the Republicans the party of nutty extremism. This is what the world looks like inside the liberal bubble.

Outside it, of course, it is entirely reasonable to question the wisdom of the Senate’s approach to immigration, to doubt that the benefits of cutting carbon emissions will be worth the costs, to reject the White House’s narrative about the gender gap in pay, to view the CBO’s estimate of the effects of the minimum wage as a good reason to refrain from raising it, and to conclude that the evidence suggests early-childhood education does not accomplish much. This president is not interested in these arguments; he would prefer it if reporters did not acknowledge their existence. Many of them will oblige without much prompting, because they see things exactly the same way.