It also comes down to how much discretionary power you view Obama as having. If Obama is effectively a dictator, then it follows that he must believe what he is doing. If Obama operates within sufficiently narrow institutional constraints as to render him effectively an impotent spectator to the policies set in motion by long-dead predecessors, then you can draw no real conclusions about his personal preferences.

Neither extreme is true, of course. But in a way, it shouldn't really matter which side of the fence you're on: Either the best the Democratic Party machine has to offer is ideologically neoliberal, in which case grassroot effort must go into changing the institutional system in a way that makes it impossible for the office of the president to push neoliberal policies. Or else the office of the President is irrelevant, and grassroot effort must go into changing the institutional system in a way that makes it impossible for it to direct the office of the president into neoliberal policies.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.