In NY Times Magazine, President Obama unleashes a barrage of lucidity that could double as Hillary's campaign offensive:
If you look at the platforms, the economic platforms of the current Republican candidates for president, they don’t simply defy logic and any known economic theories, they are fantasy. Slashing taxes particularly for those at the very top, dismantling regulatory regimes that protect our air and our environment and then projecting that this is going to lead to 5 percent or 7 percent growth, and claiming that they’ll do all this while balancing the budget. Nobody would even, with the most rudimentary knowledge of economics, think that any of those things are plausible.
If we can’t puncture some of the mythology around austerity, politics or tax cuts or the mythology that’s been built up around the Reagan revolution, where somehow people genuinely think that he slashed government and slashed the deficit and that the recovery was because of all these massive tax cuts, as opposed to a shift in interest-rate policy — if we can’t describe that effectively, then we’re doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes.
The challenge lies in piercing the right's fortified bubble of epistemic closure. Hillary's principal ally in this effort will be her "opponent" Donald Trump, however, who is systematically unmasking the right's many absurdities by being, so transparently, the campaigning absurdity in chief.
Perhaps "piercing" the bubble is the wrong verb. Shrinking it is the more realistic challenge — merely whittling down the throng of shrunken heads. And Trump more than anyone is doing what Mitt Romney would have called a "marvelous" job of it.
Which is why I'm just wild about The Donald. Only he can take the center-right to China, that sort of thing.