The Obama administration has adopted an odd tactic of going after individual media figures. I honestly can’t recall the Bush or Clinton administrations ever engaging in such a practice. The increasingly peevish Robert Gibbs’s list of offenders is getting long — Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santelli, and Jim Cramer. You might think it unseemly for the White House to engage in name calling from the briefing room, but it is also counterproductive when the White House goes after highly informed business analysts who understand, apparently far better than Gibbs, market dynamics and the impact of the administration’s policies on our prospects for recovery. (And as Jim Geraghty points out, it’s hard to demonize entire publications that raise similarly informed criticism.)

Jim Cramer writes a must-read rebuttal to the White House attack and concludes:

I believe his agenda is crushing nest eggs around the nation in loud ways, like the decline in the averages, and in soft but dangerous ways, like in the annuities that can’t be paid and the insurance benefits that will be challenging to deliver on.

So I will fight the fight against that agenda. I will stand up for what I believe and for what I have always believed: Every person has a right to be rich in this country and I want to help them get there. And when they get there, if times are good, we can have them give back or pay higher taxes. Until they get there, I don’t want them shackled or scared or paralyzed. That’s what I see now.

If that makes me an enemy of the White House, then call me a general of an army that Obama may not even know exists — tens of millions of people who live in fear of having no money saved when they need it and who get poorer by the day.

The White House is under the illusion that economic well-being of ordinary people can be separated from that of the markets and the world of investors, employers, and wealth creators. But this is a pre-World War II view of the world. The majority of voters in the country have a 401k, a pension, stocks — or, at the very least, a job. And while they may not all watch CNBC, they do, I suspect, share Cramer’s sense that the immediate concern should be preserving savings, restoring growth, and returning businesses to profitability. In that regard, in the Gibbs vs. Cramer face-off, I’d wager most Americans agree with Cramer. Which explains why Gibbs’s attacks are ultimately self-defeating.