Want to know why democratic voters aren't very motivated to vote this fall? You need to read Thomas Frank's Salon article regarding Paul Krugman's Rolling Stone article regarding President Obama.
Never allow a crisis to go to waste.
Mr. Frank again nails it.
Or take inequality. The world understands that it’s out of control, that the trends in this direction are sweeping our little bateau of state directly toward a roaring cataract called oligarchy. On this question, Krugman today applauds Obama for letting certain Bush tax cuts expire, but anyone with access to the Internet knows this isn’t even close to enough to reverse the drift toward plutocracy. There were other strategies available, however. Card check or some variation on it would have allowed unions to make a comeback and would thus have helped to bend the inequality curve. Restoring the estate tax would have helped, too. Not negotiating any more “free-trade” treaties might also have been wise. And, as my friend Bill Black wrote in his response to the Krugman article, “by discrediting the banks and bankers” through means of prosecuting a few of them, “the administration would have enormously increased the political space for real reforms on executive compensation,” meaning BONUSES, a factor responsible both for the epidemic of fraud that brought on the financial crisis and the supersonic acceleration in upper-bracket income.
However, anyone who has followed the news for the last five years knows there is another factor to be taken into consideration here: Obama didn’t do these things because he or his advisors didn’t want to do them. Oh, there were ways to get many of them done, especially in 2009 and 2010, when the world was at Obama’s feet, begging for action. (The only possible obstacle in those days was the filibuster power of Senate Republicans, which should have been—and eventually partially was—taken away.) But the Democrats’ heart wasn’t in it. They didn’t even try.
Mr. Frank makes several excellent points in his piece.
He quotes a statement made by Krugman on July 18, 2010-- prior to the brutal midterm election that year. “The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try.”
Or as one of my favorite historical Chicago architects Daniel Burnham said: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood, and probably themselves will not be realized".
and finally:
And that, folks, leads us to the greatest disappointment of them all: This administration’s utter failure of imagination. I admit that this beef might be peculiar to me, since one of the reasons I was once so psyched to see Barack Obama in the White House is because I thought he was a man who respected learning, intelligence, new ideas. Maybe he still does, in his private life. But as president, he couldn’t seem to see what is obvious to everyone who is not a regular golfer at Congressional: That ignoring the conventional and facing down the Republicans and doing the right thing—on the stimulus, on the banks, on inequality—would also have made him enormously popular, not to mention consequential and successful. It might even have spared him the electoral comeuppance he received in 2010, and whose second installment he seems likely to take delivery on just a few weeks from now.
http://www.salon.com/...
http://www.rollingstone.com/...