Insurance giant AIG, now 80% owned by the US taxpayer, is getting ready to pay hundreds of millions in bonuses to its exectives. This has the class warfare juices flowing among Democrats who see the AIG bailout as a metaphor for Republican management of the economy during the last 8 years.They will apparently try and deflect attention from their own failures by igniting populist sympathies against big banks, big business, and the rich: Beyond that, a shifting political mood challenges Mr. Obama’s political skills, as he seeks to acknowledge the anger without becoming a target of it. A central question for Mr. Obama is whether his cool style — “in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger,” he said in his address to Congress last month — will prove effective when the country may be feeling more emotional.Even as Mr. Summers was denouncing A.I.G. for the bonuses, he suggested that there was little if anything the government could do to...(Read Full Post)