The dust is still settling from last week’s political earthquake in Massachusetts, but everyone is still trying to figure out what it all means for the November elections and Obama’s presidency.
The president is getting the usual bad advice from Democratic “moderates,” i.e., corporate flunkies, such as Sen. Ben “Big Pharma” Nelson and Sen. Max “What, me hurry?” Baucus, who say Obama needs to scale back his agenda to mere Clinton-esque “little steps,” and be satisfied with “more modest expectations.” In other words, they tell the Prez, just bend even farther backward to placate the right and you’ll be OK.
Two things are wrong with that advice. First, if Obama bends any farther backward to please his critics, his spine will finally snap. Second, following such a timid plan is the surest way for Democrats to repeat last Tuesday’s debacle, over and over again come November. As veteran Democratic progressive activist and campaign manager Joe Trippi put it, “This needs to be a wake-up call that people are still demanding change.” Nooo, reeeeally? The fact that Trippi’s statement could come as a surprise to any Democrat in Washington is a sad indicator of just how out of touch with regular Americans the party’s old establishment has become.
Luckily for his presidency — and for his party, if they’ll follow his lead — Obama seems to understand that he has screwed up politically by appearing — heck, admit it, by being — too conciliatory toward the Wall Street and banking weasels who got the country into its current economic mess. And make no mistake: that, and jobs, are the critical issues the president needs to get out ahead of. The Massachusetts exit polls were pretty conclusive, and what they showed was that voters took out their frustrations and anger at the Obama administration because they felt he had sold them out to Wall Street and the banks while job losses, foreclosures and credit card squeezes piled up.
The day after the Massachusetts election, Obama came out swinging, chastising big banks, calling for limits on their size, and proposing a ban on banks that take deposits from also trading stocks for their own profit. In other words, he’s calling for a return to policies that were enacted during the Great Depression to stave off the kind of meltdown the U.S. experienced a year ago. (Those policies were repealed during the Clinton presidency in 1999.) Cynics, of course, said the announcement’s timing showed that Obama was insincere, but common sense tells you that such a set of detailed proposals can’t be prepared overnight, and had no doubt been in the works for months.
On Wednesday, Obama will deliver his annual State of the Union speech to Congress, and it’s reported that he’ll do exactly what he and his party need to do to have a chance to win back a majority of the American public: recognize that they’ve made a hash of health care reform, haven’t held Wall Street and big banks responsible for their recklessness, and spent far too little time on creating jobs. The president is said to be ready to propose job creation measures; let’s hope they’re big, bold proposals, because otherwise, he won’t be heeding the public mood outside the Washington bubble.
Obama, and the country, are at a key political moment, one that will eventually determine who gets to claim the mantle of populism — this era’s most overused word, but there you have it — and harness the voter anger seething through the electorate. The Massachusetts election results and the post-election polling show something interesting going on. It’s apparent that both the independents — such as the ones who turned against Obama in droves in Massachusetts — and the president’s progressive base want essentially the same things: a day of reckoning for the financial industry that drove us into a ditch but is now thriving again while Main Street is sinking, and more job creation. Obama lost his vaunted connection to the American voter by continuing the Bush policies of throwing money at Wall Street. In the process, he relinquished the populist label to the Tea Party crowd, which includes loads of Republicans who either have a very short memory or are pretending that the banking fiasco wasn’t brought about by their over-the-top deregulatory philosophy.
Trusting the Wall Street coddlers in his administration — Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic advisor Larry Summers — is the biggest political mistake Obama has made as president. But it’s a mistake that will be forgiven by voters if — and this is the “big if” we’ll anxiously be keeping an eye on — Obama does one thing: give the voters the change they were promised.
It’s a good sign that Obama seems to have figured out that Geithner and Summers’ “strategies” don’t work, and that he’s listening to other, more pro-middle-class advisers such as Paul Volcker, VP Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren. He has also re-assembled his political campaign team, which, in 2008, was practically without peer in U.S. history. Here’s hoping he keeps them busy. And here’s hoping that Barack Obama, who so obviously dislikes conflict and drama, can find it in himself to come out fighting in dramatic fashion. His presidency, and the nation’s future, are at stake.
This article appears in Jan 26 – Feb 1, 2010.
