What the White House has to do with English Waffles

I thought the takeaway from the Scott Brown debacle was to finally line up behind a progressive agenda and attack the recession and job losses. Well, that lasted about a week — until the Administration dropped that brick about a spending freeze.

The Administration — if you watched Jared Bernstein’s painful and unending exhibition of incoherence last night on Maddow — says this freeze is actually just part of a package of different ideas, and doesn’t kick in till down the road.  But, it’s becoming hard to believe anybody in that White House understand message management (in this critical post-Massachusetts window on the threshold of a State of the Union speech) — and the fact the media and the public cannot handle more than a simple main idea or two at a time.

This billboard in Britain should serve as a warning to a White House swerving wildly back-and-forth between a progressive and conservative agenda. Cameron — like the typical right-winger, obsessed with spending cuts even while the people are getting trampled (and worried about an attack on their health system) — is also trying to have it both ways. And you can see the result.

But then, maybe the strategy coming out of Massachusetts, with all the double-messages, is to get people who are hurting even more pissed off than they already are.