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."
