Matt Taibbi is working hard [1] to piss off a lot of media cheer-leaders with facts like these:
Obama in other words won a contentious primary against Hillary Clinton by snowing reporters like me into hyping him as the clean hands guy who’d push aside Clintonian transactional politics. Then he turned around a year later and passed his signature program with help from the worst industry actors, paying for it by killing the progressive parts of the plan.
This history — important history — is now being rewritten by people like Klein as an “ideological compromise” inspired by the Obama/Biden White House’s misguided desire to govern with Republican votes. The fact that the Affordable Care Act passed with a grand total of zero such votes is apparently irrelevant, as was Biden’s ignored and erroneous (do we only say “lie” in some cases?) insistence as a candidate last year that he found “Republican votes” for “Obamacare.
. . . .
Reporters and audiences decide what they want to believe now, and get there together. Highlight the facts you want — “JRB” is raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent! Then, downplay stuff that doesn’t fit, like that the Obama/Biden administration once proposed lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 to 28 percent, or that Biden is declining to raise that rate back to pre-Trump levels, and you can argue anything. We don’t know much about Biden’s presidency yet, but it’s crystal clear what narrative they’d like us to believe.
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