America is Addicted to Fantasy

A politician works for the next election, a statesman works for the next generation.

I commented earlier on a post in which Wretchard wrote about several manifestations of irrationally optimistic expectations. Just before he wrote that piece, Wretchard wrote about a speech by Robert Reich, a former official in the Clinton Administration, given before a liberal student audience at Berkeley in 2007.

Wretchard goes beyond the segment of the speech which concerns healthcare reform. This segment (and the troubling audience response to it) is being widely reported in the blogosphere and in conservative commentary. At first, the student audience applauded his statements, but after the segment in the video which is making the rounds, they apparently stopped applauding. Concerning the segment on healthcare reform, Wretchard says:

That is largely going to be interpreted as the “hidden truth” that the MSM doesn’t want you to know and to a certain extent it is, but not in the way the casual reader may understand it. Robert Reich was once my teacher and I knew there had to be more to it than that, and so I went to the source: UC Berkeley maintains an archive of webcasts and Reich’s speech is available there verbatim. . . . Indeed, upon listening to the speech there was more to it than that. Although Reich is liberal he is also incorrigibly intelligent and his remarks were framed as a speech by a hypothetical candidate, who for perverse reasons, could only tell the truth. His main point was that the truth was untellable. And although his politics are left of center, his hypothetical unspeakable speech slaughtered every sacred cow the Berkeley audience held dear.

You can also listen to Reich's speech (linked) if you're really serious about hearing honest words from a liberal.

Wretchard throws in a little defiance against liberal pessimism at the end of his piece. Worth your time and thought.