Could Obama Have Fought Harder For What He Says He Believes In?

Obama got kicked around pretty good over the weekend-- from the right and the left. Clark Judge is a right-wing propagandist and former speech writer for Reagan and one of the Bushs. Sunday his latest anti-Obama screed was published by a right-wing U.S. tabloid, The Mail in which the editors described him as "a top Washington insider." He may be-- but only in the circles Cheney and Bolton travel. "This weak and timid President," he insists, "talks big... and does nothing." This is followed by a few called-in right-wing talking points on the Ted Cruz/Ann Coulter-school of foreign policy.

Far more relevant was Thomas Frank's condemnation of the Obama presidency in Salon Sunday: Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: an ineffective and gutless presidency's legacy is failure. Despite the destructive insanity from the GOP/Confederate State of America, "we were promised hope and change on big issues. We got no vision and less action." Judge's critique is worthless except into a window into how the anti-American reactionary elites are reacting. Frank, on the other hand, is one of America's foremost political thinkers. If what he writes stings, it should. He channels future historians looking back to out time who see "a time when America should have changed but didn’t... an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over-- when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers miming 'seriousness' for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both. It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in-- and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless."

Cue... Hillary Clinton for 4 more years of this crap? Or... Ted Cruz? Why not try fascism, many are already thinking-- even if they don't call it that-- and see if that works this time? Elizabeth Warren seems determined not to run in 2016. She seems like the only plausible political leader who could prevent another 4 years of mediocrity or worse. She's busy fighting to keep the Senate from falling into the hands of fascism and, more than anything, she's fighting for the issues of progressivism she outlined at Netroots Nation last week.

The Obama team, as the president once announced to a delegation of investment bankers, was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” and in retrospect these words seem not only to have been a correct assessment of the situation at the moment but a credo for his entire term in office. For my money, they should be carved in stone over the entrance to his monument: Barack Obama as the one-man rescue squad for an economic order that had aroused the fury of the world. Better: Obama as the awesomely talented doctor who kept the corpse of a dead philosophy lumbering along despite it all.

Still channeling future historians-- and citizens trying to understand the failures of the 8 years of Obama's presidency, Frank asks why "did the president do so little about rising inequality, the subject on which he gave so many rousing speeches? Why did he do nothing, or next to nothing, about the crazy high price of a college education, the Great Good Thing that he has said, time and again, determines our personal as well as national success? Why didn’t he propose a proper healthcare program instead of the confusing jumble we got? Why not a proper stimulus package? Why didn’t he break up the banks? Or the agribusiness giants, for that matter?" And the response will be, of course, "the crazy right-wingers running wild in the land. He couldn’t reason with them-- their brains don’t work like ours! He couldn’t defeat them at the polls-- they’d gerrymandered so many states that they couldn’t be dislodged! What can a high-minded man of principle do when confronted with such a vast span of bigotry and close-mindedness?"

But Frank's not buying it; neither am I and it's why so many Americans who elected him are going through such severe disillusionment now. "In point of fact," he writes, "there were plenty of things Obama’s Democrats could have done that might have put the right out of business once and for all-- for example, by responding more aggressively to the Great Recession or by pounding relentlessly on the theme of middle-class economic distress. Acknowledging this possibility, however, has always been difficult for consensus-minded Democrats."

Disillusionment, by the way, not because Obama "failed to win the Grand Bargain, but because he wanted to get it in the first place--because he seemed to believe that shoring up the D.C. consensus was the rightful object of all political idealism." His electoral coalition got nothing... except the banksters-- and they have put $67,324,285 into his political career (more than they gave McCain and Hillary combined) and the LGBT community, whose issues weren't really something he even campaigned on in 2008 but who got more out of his 8 years than anyone else.