This blog continues the discussion that we began with Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).The latest book in this series is Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.
The Republican-supporting nonprofit Crossroads GPS is out with a new ad attacking President Obama over the collapse of Solyndra.
The $500,000 week-long buy on national cable is the conservative group’s second attack focused on the badly bungled stimulus investment in the solar energy company.
“$500 million to Solyndra now bankrupt,” the narrator says. “Laid-off workers? Forgotten. Typical Washington.” The ad quotes a Washington Post story calling the White House handling of the green-technology program “infused with politics at every level.”
For a national ad, it’s a small buy (combined with its super PAC arm, American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS raised $51 million in 2011). But it’s also revealing. Eight months from the election, Solyndra appears to become the prime attack against Obama — and the one he is most keen to blunt.
Americans For Prosperity, the conservative group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, spent $6 million in swing states on its own ad attacking Obama on Solyndra.
The President’s State of the Union address represents a key inflection point in the national debate on our economy and the government’s role in it. Obama wants to cast the issue in moral terms, i.e., the need to correct systemic economic unfairness. Many on the right seem to want to conduct the debate on fiscal terms and duck the moral argument. However, most Americans resonate far more with moral arguments than with fiscal ones. Moreover, Obama’s Solyndra economy gives us a vivid platform on which to conduct that moral debate.
