Sunday columnist Frank Rich looks at the coming election, and in passing touches on Obama's corporatism in remarks that are deftly on-point. For example (my emphasis):
That spread is the Democrats’ dread “enthusiasm gap.” And since that gap can’t be bridged in two months by new government programs or divine intervention for the nearly one in six Americans who are un- or underemployed, what could give the Democrats even a slender reed of hope? If there’s any plausible answer, it can be drawn from the single poll finding that is most devastating for Obama, the question (as worded by The Washington Post/ABC News) of whether “he understands the problems of people like you.” There his numbers really have imploded. When he arrived in office, 72 percent answered Yes and 24 percent No. As of last week, Yes had fallen to 50 and No had doubled to 48.Clearly, Rich gets it.
That a former community organizer and insurgent presidential candidate from a rocky middle-class background could be branded an out-of-touch elitist is not entirely the fault of his critics. Obama has perhaps never recovered from handing his administration’s plum economic jobs to Robert Rubin protégés with dirty hands from the bubble — Lawrence Summers, a deregulation advocate from the Clinton administration, and Timothy Geithner, an indulgent regulator at the New York Fed. Their presence has helped Obama’s more unscrupulous adversaries get away with the lie that his White House, not President Bush’s, created TARP. ...
The White House’s not-on-C-Span deal-making with the health care industry behemoths only cemented the administration’s corporatist image, as did Obama’s meandering path to what still looks like a loophole-ridden compromise on financial regulatory reform. This is why even many Democrats have become lukewarm in their conviction that their president “understands the problems of people like you.”
The rest of this good article contains comments on FDR and his battle in 1936 against "business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering" (Roosevelt's words), as well as comparisons between Roosevelt's campaign style and that of the new Battlin' Obama.
I found Mr. Rich's close interesting. Bringing it back to the election and the enthusiasm gap, the article suggests that the way for Obama to close that gap is to "clear up the ambiguity" about whose side he's really on.
Well played, sir. Well played. If you want to be listened to by those in the cozy seats, it's soft touch every time.
GP
