Robert Reich is Perplexed

Robert Reich spots an oddity in Obama's behaviour:

On Monday the President will offer ways to pay for his $467 billion American Jobs Act mostly by increasing taxes on the wealthy.

I’m all in favor, but it’s an odd strategy. If any Republican was prepared to vote for the jobs bill, this will send him or her scurrying.

So if the President was never really serious about getting Republican votes in the first place — if his jobs bill and the tax increase on the wealthy were always going to be part of his 2012 election year pitch — why didn’t he make his jobs bill big enough to do the job?

I think the solution is that Obama is a closet Republican. He ran as a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, but in reality he is centre-right in a lot of his thinking. When he said "change you can believe in" he really meant "change that the Republicans have been believing in".