Challenging corporate power and standing up to the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is no easy thing, and it shows. Obama has made noises about transparency and lobbyist reform, but the lobbyists are thriving and the insurance companies are licking their chops over health care reform, on which the pharmaceutical industry already cut itself a nice deal behind closed doors. Maybe some of that is necessary horse-trading, but it smells like horse-something-else.

The New Normal feels too much like the Old Normal, says my newspaper column, all of which you can read after the jump.

Free the radical

Edward Cone
News & Record
10-11-09

During the 2008 presidential campaign, it was alleged in certain quarters that Barack Obama was some sort of closet radical. The charge was implausible at the time, and now, after 11 months of plodding pragmatism, it seems downright laughable.

Sometimes, though, I wish Obama would look in that closet to see if there's just a little radicalism in there. Not just in terms of his agenda, although there are areas in which he could do more and do it faster, but in his tone and moral leadership.

What seems lacking in this presidency is a sense of urgency, and a sense of outrage. Obama does not do urgency or outrage. He is serious about the issues at hand, but his style is cool and wonkish. That may be a wise approach in terms of policy, but it feels inadequate in terms of politics. Sometimes, you need a bully in that pulpit, a little less Spock and a little more Kirk.

Maybe Obama is doing things right, moving calmly in the face of multiple crises, reminding us of the danger of fear itself. It takes time to turn a battleship around, and Obama is trying to steer a whole fleet of them. Perhaps, as Jon Stewart said about the health care debate, Obama is playing a Jedi mind game and will end up with much of what he wanted in the first place.

His administration has had some important successes. The financial system, although less healthy than it pretends to be, appears to have been rescued from a Depression-spawning spiral. The stimulus program, although weaker than it should have been, is working more or less as planned. There have been smaller wins, on things like the Internet policy of network neutrality, which bode well for the future.

But the New Normal feels too much like the Old Normal. The message is that we're going to heal slowly and resume business as usual, but that's not really the message we need.

I'd like to hear some passion from the president about undoing unemployment and his vision for future growth. What is it that puts Americans back to work, and how do we help people in the meantime? How does an economy built on consumer spending thrive when consumers are wisely sitting on their wallets, and when some measure of thrift is desirable even in flush times? What replaces the borrow-and-spend model that got us into this mess?

We also need a clear and inspiring message on Afghanistan, a problem that Obama inherited and now owns. Strategy, execution and end point, please.

And I'd like a bit more fire in the belly when it comes to taking on Wall Street. We need substantial reform of the financial system, but we are discussing incremental changes. I understand that we just took these guys off life support, but we also just passed billions of dollars to Goldman Sachs, the better to pay out bonuses to the same people who fueled the bubble.

Challenging corporate power and standing up to the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is no easy thing, and it shows. Obama has made noises about transparency and lobbyist reform, but the lobbyists are thriving and the insurance companies are licking their chops over health care reform, on which the pharmaceutical industry already cut itself a nice deal behind closed doors. Maybe some of that is necessary horse-trading, but it smells like horse-something-else.

I understand that the guy can't clean the stables all at once, and not every problem involving a Democrat -- I'm looking at you, Charlie Rangel -- is his to solve. Slow motion on issues like gay rights, Gitmo and Iraq is frustrating, but it's better than the retrograde motion it replaced.

For all that, Obama need look no further than his most vocal critics for proof of passion's peril. If he does win on health care, it will be in some part because they punched themselves out and shouted themselves hoarse without accomplishing much of anything. (Anyone who thinks anger at Obama is all about race has forgotten the Clinton era -- this country's deep paranoid streak is at least partially color blind.) When the opposition is reduced to cheering against an American city hosting the Olympics, it's forgotten what it set out to oppose.

And when opponents claim that the Democratic health care plan is "radical," even though the version moving through Congress is less bold than the vision Obama outlined in a campaign he and his party won handily, and even though a substantial majority of Americans favor some sort of public option, they are acknowledging that the nation is ready for what they call radical change.

There's a lesson in there that cautious Obama would be wise to heed.

© News & Record 2009

Comments

[Doc Alexander]

Yes, surely all of our problems would be solved if only Obama was MORE radical.

Seriously, Ed?

[Ed Cone]

I didn't say ALL of our problems, and I'm using "radical" in a relative sense, but, hell, yes.

Obama's cautious, corporate-friendly approach to healthcare and the financial industry, among other areas, seems inadequate to me.

The first email I got this morning, like DA's comment, skips over any details of Obama's alleged radicalism, and just says that Obama is a radical.

Really? In what ways?

[Andrew Brod]

Ed's channeling Bill Maher: "Barack Obama a socialist? He’s not even a liberal."