Thomas Frank: Obama’s squandered hope by David Daley for salon.com

[Douglas Carpenter]

Obama’s conciliatory nature has been a tragic flaw, one exploited by conservatives in Congress again and again. But he also argues that Obama has “enthusiastically adopted” the ideas of the right when it comes to deficit spending, Wall Street regulation, torture policies, healthcare and more. And his reward for reaching for compromise and grand bargains, “for bowing to their household gods,” has been to be depicted as a socialist and a radical leftist.

Well, certainly there are differences, of course. I don’t think Bush would have pulled out of Iraq so quickly. How soon we forget. That would still be dragging on in some way, I think. The stimulus would have been handled differently. Bush did several rounds of stimulus as president, and they always involved tax cuts. And I don’t mean to brush off the way the Obama team runs the apparatus of the state; go back and look at something like the Labor Department under George Bush, which was a joke. They were cracking down on labor unions. That’s what they thought their mission was. Of course, that’s no longer going on. The EPA — the Republicans put it in the hands of a series of people who were hostile to the mission, and that’s not going on any longer.

Obama cleaned the Republicans’ clock in 2008. And then, as you write, handed “a vanquished but utterly intransigent foe a veto” over his agenda. How does that happen?

That part of it, it’s the insult added to the injury. The worst part of it is that he didn’t seal the deal after he won in 2008. He did not want to talk about the economy and what went wrong; he did not want to talk about what went wrong with the Bush administration, and you think of all of the sort of regulatory disasters … You want to talk about what went wrong, about the people regulating Wall Street, and you couldn’t have an easier way of making that case about regulatory capture. You look at these agencies, who was in them, who was in charge of them, who they answer to, and they’re filled with lobbyists from the financial industry. It was open and shut. He doesn’t want to go back and talk about it.

Every financial commentator of the last 20 years was proven to be an ass; Alan Greenspan and all of them, looked like fools. All the people who were put in charge, all the people who were on the Op-Ed pages, like the New York Times, all the popular financial books, everything. I thought that we really had arrived at a kind of day of reckoning, and here was Barack Obama to make it happen. You think back to the 1930s, and there was this huge intellectual shift. It wasn’t just political, it was intellectual, in the academy and in magazines, everywhere you looked, in the way people felt about the economy. And that didn’t happen this time. All those people who were so badly discredited, they hung on. They’re still there; they got to keep those jobs. They just went from the old administration to the new one. He just brought in a couple of Clinton retreads and even a couple of Bush retreads, and they just kept going. There was no fallout for these people. There were no consequences for these people. The most disheartening thing when you look at it is that we didn’t make the turn. History came to a corner and we didn’t turn.

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/22/thomas_frank_obamas_squandered_hope/

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[The Magistrate]

1. An Excellent Analysis, Sir

[deutsey]

2. Yeah, I love Thomas Frank

As is often the case, his analysis here articulates exactly what I think.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. There are very few things that the righties and lefties on the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

online comment board agree on. One is that elder abuse should be severely punished. The other, clearly expressed in 2008, is that the banksters should have suffered some penalties for crashing the economy.

Obama could have laid heavy conditions (top executives resign with no golden parachute and are subject to criminal investigation) on the banks for receiving their bailouts. Instead, the crooks were even allowed to keep their bonuses (for doing what, exactly?) because "contracts are sacred."

Yet when it came time to reorganize GM, the blue collar workers had to make concessions, because somehow their contracts weren't "sacred."

I had always known that Obama isn't a progressive populist, even though he played one on TV, but even I was dismayed at that move.

[deutsey]

4. "History came to a corner and we didn’t turn."

Frank sums it up with one simple phrase.

[Doctor_J]

5. Amen

he's been a huge disappointment. What should have been a sea change turned out to be basically a distraction so that more right-wing policies could be implemented. He could have had 100 million people in the streets demanding UHC, but instead invited the insurance companies to write the HC "reform". An epic lost opportunity.

Edit: I also think that those who feel like Obama will in a second term suddenly become pro-union, pro-worker, anti-war, anti-torture, bank-regulating liberal are deluded.

[Hydra]

6. The end of the interview has this amazing tibit:

They’re Democrats, but they don’t like being Democrats. What they want to be is a kind of Tom Friedman Democrat. I’m serious, they believe in free trade and the world is flat and all that kind of bullshit. It’s not the vision of the Democratic Party of FDR or Harry Truman or even Lyndon Johnson.

I hope people are waking up to this- We basically don't have a Democratic party anymore. They've taken the space the Republicans used to hold, and the Republicans are are firmly pushing a 1% slash and burn agenda.

Loony and loonier. I think sanity packed up an left this country at some point, if we ever had it.

[deutsey]

8. +1

[tk2kewl]

7. here's to hoping he gets his shot at redemption

K&R