Oblivious

Mr. Bush and his party talk only to their base - corporate interests and the religious right - and are oblivious to everyone else's concerns.

This is the money quote from today's column by Paul Krugman. While sometimes out on a ledge, Krugman has been on a roll recently in analyzing exactly why the GOP is out of touch with mainstream American interests and suffers from falling popularity ratings which make Michael Jackson look like a national favorite.

Krugman continues:

Since November's election, the victors have managed to be on the wrong side of public opinion on one issue after another: the economy, Social Security privatization, Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay. By large margins, Americans say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and Mr. Bush is the least popular second-term president on record.

Is the administration's obliviousness to the public's economic anxiety just partisanship? I don't think so: President Bush and other Republican leaders honestly think that we're living in the best of times. After all, everyone they talk to says so.

That's pretty much the crux of the matter. If you live in an echo chamber, and you surround yourself exlucsively with soothing voices which will say what you want to hear, why wouldn't you think that things are going fabulously. It's days like this which give me hope for the '06 mid-terms. Some people may be in for an extremely rude awakening.