Barak Obama has chosen to attack Hillary Clinton on inaction on what he calls “the social security crisis”. He does not get it.

While people have some legitimate concerns about Social Security in the (very) distant future, the problem facing the US is that health care is eating us up.

What’s more, not only do the vast majority of Americans find the Republican meme of a “Social Security Crisis” to be pathetic and stupid Republican double talk, so does an overwhelming majority of the Republicans out there.

In fact, the only people who are selling the crisis meme about social security besides corrup partisan Republican hacks like Grover Norquist and Bush and His Evil Minions^™ are the Very Serious People inside the beltway, the Fred Hyatts, the Charles Krauthammers, the Bob Novaks, etc.

The very serious people in the beltway are wrong about EVERYTHING, and he seems determined to please him.

When Krugman titles today’s OP/ED, “Played for a Sucker, he is more right than you can possibly imagine.

The American people don’t care about bipartisanship. They want a government that works for them. They do not care how it is accomplished, but they want a rising standard of living, and to stop living in fear and uncertainty that the next illness can wipe them out, and Barak Obama, like the rest of the Very Serious People inside the beltway, don’t care about that.

All they care about is that they can go to each other’s cocktail parties and have a nice time. They do not care about the government working for them.

To quote the future Nobel prize winner in economics:

I don’t believe Mr. Obama is a closet privatizer. He is, however, someone who keeps insisting that he can transcend the partisanship of our times — and in this case, that turned him into a sucker.

Mr. Obama wanted a way to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton — and for Mr. Obama, who has said that the reason “we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions” is that “politics has become so bitter and partisan,” joining in the attack on Senator Clinton’s Social Security position must have seemed like a golden opportunity to sound forceful yet bipartisan.

But Social Security isn’t a big problem that demands a solution; it’s a small problem, way down the list of major issues facing America, that has nonetheless become an obsession of Beltway insiders. And on Social Security, as on many other issues, what Washington means by bipartisanship is mainly that everyone should come together to give conservatives what they want.

This position on Social Security, much like his despicable use of dog whistle anti-gay bigotry in his South Carolina campaign, is something that the Very Serious People inside the beltway appreciate. They think that the rest of us are stupid. They think that we are bigoted rubes.

They want nothing to do with the people who live in America and make things work, and they don’t want to make things better, because they are doing fine right now, and having to work for a living is beneath them.