If there is a single plank in the Democratic platform on which Obama can claim to have won, it is taxing the rich.
Obama ignored vast swaths of his agenda, barely mentioning climate change or education reform, but by God did he hammer home the fact that his winning would bring higher taxes on the rich. He raised it so relentlessly that at times it seemed out of proportion even to me, and I wrote a book on the topic. But polls consistently showed the public was on his side.
Obama's goal was to prove to the GOP that their rigid defense of the richest one percent was political poison and to force them to bend. For now, at least, their same monomaniacal refusal to increase any taxes on the rich is leading Republicans to deny any connection between the tax issue and Obama's victory. ...
The harsh truth that fend-for-yourself economic libertarianism is a worldview mainly confined to the shrinking, aging white electorate is a reality Republicans prefer not to acknowledge.
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Of course, what the people want is all fairly beside the point now. What matters in Washington is power and leverage-two things that accrued dramatically in Obama's favor last week.
But it's not irrelevant that American voters had a chance to lay down their marker on the major social divide of our time: whether government can mitigate the skyrocketing inequality generated by the marketplace....
Here it was, right before our eyes: a class war, or the closest thing one might find to one in modern American history, as a presidential election. The outcome was plain.
The 47 percent turned out to be the 51 percent.
We won one battle in a class war that his been waged by Republicans, won by Millionaires and Billionaires for years.
Time to boldly take that victory bull by the horns as Republicans have never been hesitant to do.
