THAT’S RICH…. The Politico has a fairly long piece today on whether President Obama will be able to keep the “well-to-do friends” who supported his campaign last year. The president, the argument goes, might alienate the wealthy with economic proposals geared towards leveling the economic playing field.
One striking, if little-noted, trend of the past presidential election was that Obama won the affluent vote — those making more than $200,000 annually — with 52 percent. Moving down the income scale a bit, he and John McCain essentially tied among those making between $100,000 and $200,000.
In 2008, exit polls showed the percentage of voters earning more than $100,000 had jumped to a historic high of 26 percent, compared with just 9 percent in 1996. Obama’s strong showing among this bloc reversed a decades-old pattern in which the more money someone made, the more likely he or she was to vote Republican.
But these voters are not being repaid for their support — more like the other way around.
Mark Penn posed a series of questions, telling the Politico, “If Obama comes down more heavily on them, how will they react? Will their support fade?”
All of this strikes me as overwrought. What is the president accused of doing to the wealthiest Americans? Most notably, he plans to raise their taxes back to pre-Bush levels, and exclude them from policies geared towards the middle class.
If this were some kind of new, post-inauguration proposal, I could see why it might be slightly more controversial. But the point of the article seems to be that wealthy voters may reject the same Obama plans he outlined during the campaign.
In other words, the same people who voted for Obama and his platform might be disappointed if he keeps his promises and does what he said he’d do.
Seems like a stretch.
