It’s a well-kept secret in some corners, but Wall Street isn’t exactly popular with the American mainstream. It’s not just the Occupy Wall Street protests — after financial industry corruption and mismanagement nearly destroyed the global economy, there’s ample evidence much of the public hasn’t exactly gotten over it.
What’s striking, then, is to see leading Republicans, including all of the top GOP presidential candidates, go out of their way to side with Wall Street over American consumers. It’s counter-intuitive — do Mitt Romney and his congressional allies really think voters are clamoring for an agenda that goes easy on those who crashed our economy? — but it’s apparently a vote-getter in Republican primaries.
Democrats apparently intend to make this clear to the rest of the country. Politico reports this morning that Dems, at multiple levels, “plan to dramatically step up criticisms of Republican presidential candidates for their vows to repeal Wall Street reform and on Senate Republicans who are blocking the president’s choice to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”
As part of the effort, the Democratic National Committee unveiled this video this morning, called, “Republicans: On the Side of Wall Street, Not Consumers.”
The message campaign will reportedly focus on Ohio, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
In other words, it’s fairly broad in scope.
If I didn’t know better, I might think Dems are taking economic populism very seriously in advance of the 2012 elections.
