Obama Needs to Ditch the 'Wall Street Liberal' Label

"Wall Street Liberal" is pretty much the worst label you could stick on a politician: The left has no great love of Wall Street, while the "liberal" part ticks off the right. Bad news, then, for President Obama—who is actually neither liberal nor a Wall Street darling—that a "significant part of the American voting population has come to see the administration as both too liberal and too tied to Wall Street," EJ Dionne writes in the Washington Post.

Dionne's advice to Obama is to cast off the dreaded label by having "a fight or two with Wall Street and the big banks on behalf of balancing the budget." A battle between Obama and Wall Street would have "the benefit of challenging the Tea Party movement to come clean on whether it really is populist, or merely using populist rhetoric to pursue the same old low-tax, low-regulation agenda that got us into this mess."


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