Obama was perfect for the role of Progressive Champion--from the point of view of the hedgies & co. He appears to have had no real goal other than being POTUS, acting cool as POTUS and doing a few things at the margins, involving tone. His goal seems to have been to manipulate appearances rather than to change substance.
But even in failure, rather,especially in failure, he serves well his large donors. While he remains POTUS little worthwhile is likely to be accomplished, because he doesn't have the heart, the stomach or the instincts for a real fight with the powers that be. Any efforts he appears to make against entrenched elites are most likely to fail and to discredit even the attempt. Worse, I don't think the really understands this and may never.
Where is an LBJ when we need him most? LBJ defined politics as "consisting of the art of knowing when to hold a knife to a man's belly---and when to push it in. The people Obama would have to go up against understand this, or at least enough of them do. To go against them, one has to be willing to kill some or all of them--politically and civilly, for they are most certainly prepared to destroy politicians perceived as real threats. The easiest path would be to prosecute them, put them in jail and take away their money. There is no shortage of laws that have been violated.
But it is just a fact that anyone who undertakes such a mission has to be prepared for it to be a suicide mission. The suicide might be political or it might be physical. It might well be averted if the attack on the powers that be is sufficiently effective. But the risk will be there. Obama isn't willing to exacerbate that risk. I don't know if he sees anything important enough to justify risking his own life. It is a high bar, but one that Martin Luther King understood and accepted.
As always, I hope I am wrong and will be delighted if I am, but fear I am right. I think we need a new party to have a chance of bringing about the needed change. There should be room for one functional party that can effectively support the true interests of >90% of the population. But it requires a leader that can make at least >50% more of the population understand what their true interest is. The spell cast by neo-conservative politics and neo-classical economics over the minds of the public must be broken. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
could it have been spent in more useful ways that it was?
Yet now we have deficit hawks telling us we cannot make the infrastructure investments or pay for health care reform because of all of the debt we have recently taken on. I recall a diary I wrote on Opportunity Cost. But of course you knew the answer when you asked the question. How can we compare self-liquidating debts to good money sent after bad money? As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
The problem for the Obama administration is that, at least as far as confronting the power of the banking and insurance industries which are held in general derision by the American people of all political stripes, he has hamstrung himself with two advisors whose counsel has been politically disastrous to the admin - Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, two figures whose closeness to those industries is proving far more a liability than the asset I am sure the administration hoped it would be.
Like it or not, the gestalt of the time is that the bankers who'd brought the economy to its knees should in their turn be brought to heel. Now was not the time to put into prominent positions such consistent and long-established Wall Street ass-kissers (thinking especially of Geithner here). People want their pound of flesh, and frankly, with falling wages and nearly 1 in 5 Americans unable to find proper work largely because of these entitled banker millionnaire's handiwork, they deserve it.
My guess, in my belief that Obama is an intensely intelligent and considered man (the latter unfortunately in these times not necessarily a virtuous quality), one or both (and almost assuredly Geithner)of these advisors will be gone before November. Hopefully, very visibly. And, it increasingly appears, Bernie Sander's highly virtuous hold on Bernanke's mistaken re-nomination will provoke a rejection of the third bad leg of Obama's economic policy stool... Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
And he's not trying to do anything to solve the problem. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
...it increasingly appears, Bernie Sander's highly virtuous hold on Bernanke's mistaken re-nomination will provoke a rejection of the third bad leg of Obama's economic policy stool.
The theory that Obama has no substance is a Luntz generated attack.
Well, to me, many people "on the left" have a poor grasp on what will appeal to their fellow citizens. I note that Dennis Kucinich who, to me, is a mildly reformist politician, was unable to gain significant support in the Democratic primaries. The right has an easy time stirring up "reactionary populism". That's not the same as left populism, as the Communist Party of Germany found out to its dismay in the 1920s.
I feared that he did not have what it took from the moment he announced. He was my least favorite of all of the Democratic candidates, despite his many attractive qualities. I feared that he did not have the experience or the instincts for the political fight he would have to face in order to do what needed to be done. But I supported him in the general election, have owned up to that support and don't regret it, given the choice.
I hoped for the best through the transition and inauguration and waited with increasing queasiness through the first few months, hoping that he would do what was needed. I finally reached the point of despair last summer, when Chris Cook had to remind me that it is not over, appearances to the contrary from my point of view.
I have yet to see anything to persuade me that breaking the power of Wall Street over Washington was not the most basic challenge by at least an order of magnitude. If that not be accomplished, little else matters, from my point of view. We are headed over the falls into an ever increasing supranational corporate distopia. I feel especially bad for the younger generations.
Opportunities such as were available to Obama upon his inauguration are once in a century occurrences, from what I have seen in half a century of observation. Given his intelligence, that he did not even want to try to rein in their power at the one time it could have been done is hard to forgive. But were he able to do so now, all would be forgiven and I would happily dine on crow. Come the day.
As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
And I think Wall Street is irrelevant superstructure.
"He was my least favorite of all of the Democratic candidates, despite his many attractive qualities."
The others would have lost. First requirement of a politician is the ability to take power.
By the way, my father helped organize and was the first president of a local of the Operating Engineers in the oilfields of northern Oklahoma in the mid '50s. But I left Oklahoma in 1963 and didn't return, even to visit, until 1991. When I moved to Arkansas in Jan. 2006 I had not been here since 1954, when I visited the homestead and farm where my paternal grandmother had been born and raised in the Boston Mountains in Washington County, western Arkansas. I spent my adult life in Arizona and Los Angeles. Most of the contractors for whom I worked in Los Angeles were union contractors and though engineering was a non-union position, the hourneyman electronics tech set the floor for engineering positions, so I do know something about unions and consider them a great plus, faults notwithstanding. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
However, I cannot agree with the conspiracy theory at their core. It simply does not match with my (admittedly limited) sense of how things work in the world.
The establishment is the establishment, especially in the senate. The majority of them are not, and never were, very liberal. They were, for the most part, elected during the period of backlash against the center-left policies of the New Deal, and their beliefs, attitudes, and behavior reflects that. Defensive caution, lack of fighting spirit, and centrist (at best) policies and positions do not require a conspiracy theory to explain - they are acquired habits of the past 30 years. There is a marked difference between many of the people elected in the past 5-6 years with those elected 10-20 years ago.
Obama is marred by this as well, much as it's easy for people to have believed from his speeches that he wasn't.
You keep insisting that financial super-regulation would have been a slam dunk a year ago. I don't agree, and never have. The learned and accepted narratives, frames, and intellectual habits were too strong for that to ever be possible, just as I cannot imagine it to be possible now.
The only solution is constant electoral activism to replace the old with the new. Actual experience with the process of democracy, and knowledge built of governance from such activism, is worth more than a thousand hours of Rush.
I am equally concerned that not only was this bad policy from a public policy perspective but that propping up the current system is basically untenable and that so doing is just making the next crisis more severe. This crisis first emerged only seven years after the dot-com bubble burst and the next crisis, most likely fueled by an explosively dangerous dollar carry trade will almost certainly occur within the next seven years, which, were he planning on a two term presidency, should have concerned him.
This was and is a matter of self preservation for both his administration and the country. The structure of finance is vital to the economy and the economy is the bedrock of the society. Obama is smart enough to grasp that. I fault him for not even seriously examining the structural problem with finance. He asked Volker to show up for photo-ops but didn't listen to him. He had a duty of care to bring in people like Simon Johnson, Elizabeth Warren and Sheila Bair, draw out their concerns and seriously consider his options. He didn't, so far as I can see. Volker has had to go public in his dissent. It is one thing to try and fail. It is entirely another to oppose even the effort. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
