Perhaps the volume hasn’t been quite as loud as it was in 2008, perhaps a lot of the discussion has been subsumed into coded language, but the 2012 presidential election is still very much about redistribution: when it’s fair, when it isn’t, and, perhaps most importantly from a political perspective, whether Americans like it.
Just look at the last couple weeks. At about the same time Mitt Romney was catching flak for his secretly videotaped comments about the allegedly lazy, freeloading 47% of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes, the GOP was hammering President Obama for saying back in 1998 that “I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level, to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.”
Now, as it turns out, the clip of Obama was a bit selectively edited. But the fact remains that while we’re not hearing quite as much hysterical cauterwauling about socialism and redistribution — at least not in such explicit terms — this election is still very much about core questions of who should gets what, and who should pay for it.
