In The Future Democrats Shouldn't Settle For Anyone Less Than A Candidate Who Goes Beyond Just Mouthing This Rhetoric

If you missed the President's soaring populist rhetoric in Kansas on Monday-- and it's less than an hour-- please watch it above. This is the president we thought we were getting three years ago when we were celebrating his victory over McCain. You've heard about it in the news by now-- Obama's Teddy Roosevelt speech. It's too late though. He's been president for 3 years and his record speaks for himself. He's no Teddy Roosevelt. Aside from being the first half African-American president, his legacy is that he fits right in with most U.S. presidents-- absolutely mediocre and, alas, a dedicated upholder of the status quo. His chance for a second term remains what Rahm Emanuel-- one of the architects of Obama's determined mediocrity of agenda-- always said it would be, the threat of an even worse and less plausible Republican. Last night brilliant investigative journalist Lee Fang turned to analysis and warned the Obama folks that if Mitt Romney is Alf Landon, then Obama had better start not just sounding Rooseveltian, but governing that way as well.

Roosevelt won by ignoring the policy positions of Landon. He flanked national Republicans in January of 1936 by launching a political assault on Wall Street fat cats in charge of the GOP. In spring of 1936, Senator Hugo Black (D-Alabama) pressed on with his investigation of corporate front groups, exposing the financiers of anti-New Deal fake “grassroots” groups (and to an extent the rich donors pulling the strings of the Landon campaign) were the same people who destroyed the economy. The investigation revealed to the American people that Roosevelt still faced an uphill battle, that the “economic royalists” still had too much political power, and that Landon and his allied front groups were merely puppets of a moneyed and selfish aristocracy. Roosevelt’s top political hand, James Farley, mapped out a strategy of running against robber barons like the du Pont family rather than wasting time by talking about Landon’s record. The American people saw past the GOP/Wall Street propaganda machine and voted Roosevelt. The strategy worked.

I understand the temptation to run against Romney as a flip-flopping opportunist. It’s pretty easy to demonstrate and Romney continues to try to reinvent himself, even while shooting himself in the foot at times. That being said, do the American people care? Outside the bubble of Washington DC, will Americans reject Romney simply because he has changed his positions multiple times? For many independent voters, the ability to change position and support smart policies (like health reform), is a virtue, not a vulnerability. The reason Kerry lost, in my most humble opinion, was the failure to crystallize opposition to the war in Iraq, and the flip-flopping charge spoke to his inherent weakness in the face of tough decisions like foreign policy. Today, Americans for the most part feel cheated by the economy and by the political system, and that feeling has exploded with the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Will a campaign centered on flip-flopping really speak to this sentiment? I doubt it.

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich-- easily the best of Clinton's cabinet members-- called the Osawatomie address "the most important economic speech of his presidency". Hopefully, he meant "so far." Because the speech, wonderful and thrilling as it was, isn't going to make up for three years of mediocrity. He can still win because Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney may be proven to be as implausible to undecided swing voters and "moderates" as they are to people who watch Rachel Maddow. Let's hope-- for the sake of the nation's future. Because-- unlike what Stalin told the German Communists in 1931-- there is a difference, and a significant one, between a center right bourgeois party (like the Obama wing of the Democratic Party) and a far right fascist party (like today's GOP).

Reich makes the point that Obama connected the dots yesterday, which is how the Administration is spinning Osawatomie for the media. Reich claims that Obama asserted "a willingness to take on the powerful and the privileged that have gamed the system to their advantage." Yeah? Excuse me if I don't take him at his word before Eric Holder follows, for example, Darcy Burner's advise from last week. "It's against the law for banks to foreclose on soldiers who are serving on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. We don't want them distracted by what's going on at home. We want them focused on their duties there. And yet it turns out that the banks have done it thousands of times. Attorney General Holder, please do your job; protect our troops and prosecute the bankers."

Instead we may be hearing these great speeches but legitimate protesters against banksterism are being beaten, pepper-sprayed and arrested while banksters get million dollar untaxed bonus checks as taxpayer expense. Something's wrong with that picture that a nice speech in Osawatomie-- reminding us that Teddy Roosevelt actually acted against the banksters-- isn't going to make go away. Reich reminds us that Obama is the first president to tell the country that the long-term structural problem that’s been widening the gap between the very top and everyone else is the breaking of the basic bargain linking pay to productivity gains. Obama:

For most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and investments than ever before. But everyone else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t-- and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up.

...We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or sometimes even understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. Huge bets-- and huge bonuses-- made with other people’s money on the line. Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all.

It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility across the system. And it plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we are still fighting to recover. It claimed the jobs, homes, and the basic security of millions-- innocent, hard-working Americans who had met their responsibilities, but were still left holding the bag.

The Paul Ryans, Fred Uptons, Eric Cantors and Scott Browns of the world-- the shameless whores who do the bidding of the banksters for a pot of gold-- well, lots of pots of gold-- are screaming "class war" and accusing Obama of dividing the country. But only a fool-- and that's apparently the target demo Emanuel has urged Obama pay attention to all along-- doesn't know that the one percent and their conservative allies/whores have been waging a successful class war against the rest of us since Ronald Reagan managed to put a smiley face on their toxic agenda. Reich asks what this means for restoring middle-class security in today’s economy? Obama:

It starts by making sure that everyone in America gets a fair shot at success. The truth is, we’ll never be able to compete with other countries when it comes to who’s best at letting their businesses pay the lowest wages or pollute as much as they want. That’s a race to the bottom that we can’t win - and shouldn’t want to win. Those countries don’t have a strong middle-class. They don’t have our standard of living.

In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt came here, to Osawatomie, and laid out his vision for what he called a New Nationalism. …

The fact is, this crisis has left a deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. And major banks that were rescued by the taxpayers have an obligation to go the extra mile in helping to close that deficit. At minimum, they should be remedying past mortgage abuses that led to the financial crisis, and working to keep responsible homeowners in their home. We’re going to keep pushing them to provide more time for unemployed homeowners to look for work without having to worry about immediately losing their house.

And like most of us, Reich concludes that he wishes Obama had made this a condition for the banks receiving the bailouts the Bush Regime-- with the very active connivance of Boehner, Cantor and Ryan (remember, Bush's TARP bankster bailout was defeated before those 3 and their allies twisted enough arms of GOP congressmen to turn the vote around 4 days later)-- bestowed on them. Reich interprets the speech as "the platform Obama will run on in 2012 — increasing taxes on the rich, investing in the rest us, requiring corporations and Wall Street banks that reap benefits from being in America create good jobs for Americans, and protecting our democracy from being corrupted by money." For the rest of us, we need to decide if we can believe he'll use that platform to govern on if he wins a second term. Or do we just give that up as hopeless and remember what Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are?

Brad Miller (D-NC) put it a little differently on the phone a couple of minutes ago: "If we’d had three years of speeches like President Obama’s speech yesterday in Kansas, and more important, policies in the populist and progressive economic tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, I would still be in the majority and there would be no need for OWS."