Once again: Why Obama won't--and can't--be Roosevelt

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Once-again-Why-Obama-won-by-Patrick-Martin-110813-593.html

A lengthy commentary published August 7 in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times makes many criticisms of the policies of President Barack Obama, but collapses in the face of the most vital and compelling issue: which class interests the Obama administration serves.

Under the headline, "What Happened to Obama?" Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, expresses the disillusionment of many liberal supporters of Obama, who believed that the election of the first African-American president represented a watershed and an opportunity to revive the liberal reform policies associated with Roosevelt's New Deal and the Great Society measures of the 1960s.

While couched in the language of post-modernism -- Westen complains about Obama's failure to "tell a story" or provide a compelling "counternarrative" to the Republican ultra-right -- the criticisms are sharper than anything that has appeared recently in the Times, especially after the departure of two of the newspaper's more liberal columnists, Bob Herbert and Frank Rich.

Westen focuses his critique especially on Obama's refusal to denounce those responsible for the 2008 financial collapse -- the bankers and billionaire speculators -- and to promote an aggressively liberal alternative to the bank bailout initiated in the final months of the Bush administration and then expanded after the Democratic administration took over.

More at the link --

[DJ13]

1. The original article must have touched a nerve

This is like the second or third different article that tries to excuse Obama in some way and mentions the Westin article.

[Ruby the Liberal]

2. Obama can't be Roosevelt because they approach issues from

opposite angles. Obama went Hoover last month, as did Roosevelt in 1937, but by 1939, Roosevelt pivoted and walked it back. We shall see in another year when the economy is even worse off if Obama finds his inner FDR or not, but I am not seeing that same passion in Obama that FDR had.

Temperament wise, I think history will chalk Obama up as being the reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain.

[Angry Dragon]

3. I do not feel that history will be very kind to President Obama

[Ruby the Liberal]

4. Not in this day and age.

Not one credible economist has stood up and promoted the economic policies he has signed. Not the weak stimulus (that was 40% useless tax cuts), not the health insurance bill, not the debt ceiling 'agreement'.

Christina Romer quit because he refused to listen to her on the stimulus, as did Larry (of all people) Summers (whose policies caused this SNAFU in the first place). If you read between the lines in the interviews aired in the last week with Austan Goolsbee (notably Jon Stewart's), the debt ceiling debacle was a tipping point for him. In time, he will likely be more vocal. Nobel Laureates swarmed like someone hit a wasp nest with a bat warning about how detrimental these policies were, but it all fell on deaf ears in favor of "making friends" (or whatever the damn agenda he has).

In the end, historians will defer to the economists on record, not the politicians, when they do their grading. While the politicians will be faulted, the economists will be held up as harbingers whose canary in the coal mine wan't heeded in lieu of temporary political pressures.

SSDD (Same shit, different decade)