Who’s driving? Bob Shrum says Mitt Romney’s “tax avoidance” embodies “unfairness in a moment when economic justice has emerged as a driving issue.” Maybe I’m missing something, but where is the evidence, in actual off-year or primary election returns (and not the hopes of Bob Shrum and the media) that “economic justice”–and not jobs and growth–is now a “driving issue” in the election? Who has actually been driven? I mean, “economic justice” could be a driving issue–income inequality has certainly been rising the past few decades. There’ve even been a few off-year elections–1982 comes to mind–when “fairness” actually has been an issue. In this election, so far, press has hyped the Occupy demonstrations and written lots of articles reporting, in a self-fulfilling kind of way, an
intensifying national debate over taxation and income inequality, which burst into the campaign this month when rival candidates began attacking Mr. Romney’s career in the leveraged buyout business.**
But is this “debate” actually motivating voters? Yes, there are surveys showing voters don’t like rising income inequality when asked about it. But where’s the candidate who has actually won a race on an anti-inequality/Occupy platform the way Harris Wofford won a Senate seat in 1991 on the health care issue (or the way lots of candidates have won races on Tea Party platforms)?. …
Obvious alternative explanation: Democrats would like to make economic justice a driving issue because President Obama can’t afford to have jobs be a driving issue (at least until the economy is in better shape than it is). The press is helping him. Might work! Until there is actual evidence that it’s working, though, maybe Shrum should say “in a moment when people like me are trying to make economic justice a driving issue.”
_____
**– Was the fuss made by “rival candidates” over Romney’s leveraged buyout business really a “debate over taxation and income inequality”? I thought it was a debate over whether Romney was a job-destroyer or a job-creator. I guess everything is about taxation and income inequality these days if you are a mid-level New York Times editor rewriting your reporters’ ledes.