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In 2008, Barack Obama ran on a campaign of reform and change. In 2009, change means reform that Olympia Snowe can believe in.
Before there were tea partiers, there were nurses. Angry nurses disrupting Sen. Max Baucus’ health care reform meetings back in the politically halcyon days of spring. Their complaint was simple: Democrats refused to even discuss proposals for single-payer, universal coverage. But unlike the deference that anti-reform zealots won this summer, all the nurses got for their trouble was jail time.
That’s because as far back as the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama began defining “reform” as something far more modest. The Obama campaign, Washington’s Democratic leadership and the progressive advocates who backed them agreed that Obama’s public plan—a competitive option inside the private insurance market—would be the face of reform. Everything more ambitious than that—like a single-payer plan—quickly became too radical to be taken seriously, while laughably cautious industry proposals defined the opposing boundary of compromise.
The result? The most aggressive plan on the table today—Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House bill—will get a lousy extra 2 percent of Americans into affordable health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Better than nothing, sure. But what happened to “Yes, we can”?
That catch phrase went into the same dustbin of history that holds so many previous campaign slogans. Though it remains blasphemy in both black and liberal circles to say so, today’s Barack Obama is no champion of reform. He’s a Democratic president and certainly governs from his party’s more activist perspective. But if one thing is clear in the year since Nov. 4, 2008, it’s that this White House is not playing for the deep, systemic change it campaigned on. Rather, reform in the age of Obama has been, at best, tinkering we can believe in.
Health care offers an ideal case study, but examples stretch across the wide range of policy debates President Obama has either sought out or had foisted upon him. And nowhere has the tinkering tendency been more clear than in the timid way in which the administration has gone about righting our economy and reining in the banks that put us off track in the first place.
Time and again, Obama has defined down Wall Street reform. He went from calling for a foreclosure freeze as a candidate to handing mortgage servicers $75 billion in no-strings incentives—a plan that has left foreclosures churning at more than 350,000 a month. He wagged his finger at bailout recipients, then let them off the hook with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s meaningless “stress tests.” And now, the White House’s answer for “too big to fail” banks is to help them fail in an orderly fashion, with taxpayer money—basically institutionalizing the bailout. Never mind not letting the banks get that big in the first place.
This trend started, as many have noted, when Obama assembled the most conventional economic thinkers in Washington to lead his declared search for unconventional solutions. He made so much fuss over not hiring lobbyists in his administration that people who worked for Human Rights Watch couldn’t get jobs. Yet, his economic team is crammed with Wall Street insiders. Chief economic adviser Larry Summers took in nearly $8 million in consultancy and speaking fees from Wall Street in 2008 alone.
Arianna Huffington was among Obama’s loudest, most gushing supporters during the campaign. Looking back on the year since Election Day 2008, through the lens of Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s new book, she asked chilling questions about the company he keeps today. Her essay is worth quoting at length:
Reading the book, I often found myself wondering what Candidate Obama would think of President Obama. Would he look at what the White House is doing and say, "That's what I and my supporters worked so hard for?"
How did the candidate who got into the race because he'd decided that "the core leadership had turned rotten" and that "the people were getting hosed" become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?
How did the candidate who told a stadium of supporters in Denver that "the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result" become the president who has surrounded himself with the same old players trying the same old politics, expecting a different result?
All of this is before we even get to foreign policy, or social issues like gay civil rights and criminal justice reform. Obama’s environmental team makes a far more credible claim to the reform mantle than its economic or health care counterparts. But it remains to be seen whether the White House will sideline the true reformers when the climate change debate begins, too. Already, Baucus is vowing to gum up the climate change bill in the same way he did health care. Will the White House again make him a king?
It’s fair to say Obama has had a full plate since he stepped off the victory stage at Grant Park a year ago. But that was the whole point: We are in trying times and tens of millions of voters rallied around the promise of radical, new leadership to navigate us. Nobody said the job would be an easy one.
So the question now is what all of us who wanted change that we could believe in are willing to do to get it today. Perhaps if we finally lay aside the hero worship of a single man and embrace our responsibility to be engaged, critically thinking citizens, we can truly enter the era of reform we voted for. Perhaps we can push him to be the radical reformer that the establishment feared he would be.
Kai Wright is The Root’s senior writer. Follow him on Twitter.
Comments
Obama is no different then any other politician. They promise everything while they are running for office and never really deliver anything that they promised after elected. So let's don't kid ourselves just because Obama is black.
what a great program for american
I'm 50 years old now. What that means to me is that I'm gradually leaving the idealism and fervent optimism of my youth and turning more toward the pragmatism and realism of the more wise and prudent among us. A year ago, I was extremely pleased to see the President make history with his election. A year later, I'm still pleased to see him at the seat of power, but I've always felt that his tasks are daunting, and despite who would have won last year, I don't think the overall situations currently facing our country would have been any different. Lest we forget, we were in a mess long before Barack Obama came on the scene. I have to agree with Galba and Bee's comments - that our country has been taken over by the opportunistic and the greedy. Anyone running for political office nowadays seems to be easy prey to these opportunists and greed mongerers; actually, it's as if this has become the direct order of things - that politicians can't get anywhere without first being blessed by these individuals. If this remains constant, we will go the way of the Romans, whom I believe because of their arrogance and decadence, imploded and were subsequently overtaken by warring factions.
If Obama truly is the agent of change, he will require a huge amount of stamina and faith to actually start chipping away at this monumental wall of resistance to change.
My father told me a long time ago that there are two constants in life - time and change - they always occur. If the President means to change things, lets give him time. Change certainly doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen. I agree with Bee in that this current mess has been long in the making. How can we expect changing out of it to take less than a year. Think about this though - change did actually occur a year ago when he was elected
Pray for the President, pray for the country - let's just pray.
In many respects, we do have change, because we have a democrat in the WH, and we have a dem majority. The people who voted for President Obama have to support him, and hold him to his promises. I continue my active support of the President, I still contribute money, and I'm still making phone calls, and sending emails to support health care reform, environmental clean-up, and other important issues. The citizenry of this country will never understand that the presidency is not all-powerful; that an active role as citizens in democracy is required to make it work.
However, without loud, vocal support and pushing, it will be business as usual because the office of the President supercedes the person sitting there. Those with power, who have been in power, don't care who is president, they only care about keeping their power and their money...and we know this country's history when it comes to dealing with presidents who don't tow the line-they are eliminated.
I have always wished that even as Candidate Obama, that he had been more outspoken, more willing to duke it out as necessary, but he has always presented himself as a cool, calm gentleman, who believes in the best in people. It was a charming naivete during the campaign, but now, it's just old. I wish that he would use his power and no matter whom he has on his team of opposites (bad idea!), he needs to let it be known that he is the "decider", like his predecessor would have done, and do what he said he would do FOR THE PEOPLE. We have a majority; later for Olympia Snowe-she must want something that can be negotiated.
Staying in the Oval office for 8 years isn't all it's cracked up to be -4 years of being effective would be just fine with me, especially if real change took place.
I believe that often you get what you pay for, and if you buy something just because you like the package, you might not want to open the package. We now have an open package and it is not what we thought we were purchasing. As long as BO lets Nancy and Reid be his guides, we will get a sub par product. Come on BO, put your pants back on and lead the country!
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Flowers, who with his partner Daryl Wells owns and operates the Van Cleef Hair Studio in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, has been styling Mrs. O’s hair since she graduated from high school. The salon, staffed by multi-cultural stylists, is known for its expertise with African-American hair. Many local television anchor-women of color are also Van Cleef regulars. For years, Flowers has spent approximately two hours a week coiffing Mrs. O’s hair. He is credited with giving her the Jackie-esque flip style she often wore in the beginning of the campaign and also with the straightened bob look she has sported in more recent months.
buy forclosed homes--buy forclosed homes
The statement that only 2% more of the nation will "receive affordable health care" is so misleading that it is really fiction.
The Public Option is Supposed to only service a few people. It is tool, only tool to check the pricing of the private issuers. We don't want it to cover say 30% of the nation. That would be a problem.
If it only covers 2%- 5% that would be good way to keep the insurance industry just frightened enough not to triple their rates.
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I think Obama meant to be radically transformative when he campaigned for the job - the issue is that it's one thing to promise something and something totally different to deliver.
One of the criticisms of his candidacy was that he had a very thin resume for the job and no leadership experience. That's really showing as he has punted responsibility on the form of the stimulus bill, as well as his floundering on health care and foreign policy. A leader has to have the backbone and willpower to push their goals through whether that means mixing it up with supporters or opponents, and I don't think the president has demonstrated this quality thus far.
Perhaps he will learn how to lead and accomplish concrete goals as time goes on, but some of the damage he has done to himself in disappointing his supporters and acquiring a reputation for indecision will not go away and re-election in 2012 will likely be much more difficult (although definitely not impossible).
Study your Roman history, and you will see. America has entered the the end phase of the republic. Corporations and a multiethnic top 1% create the appearance of a more egalitarian state than having a nobility over us, but it is the same. The vast majority of citizens out of work, living on bread handouts from the state, 180+ days of games to distract the populace...It's back! And this time, because it appears to be fair, everyone in the world wants in, and it has coopted Christianity, so it will never change or be brought down. Democrat/republican; populare/optimate- it's all the same. If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes. Now sit back and watch as the change agent enriches himself and his family. Did you know the Clintons have a nine figure net worth now? Emperor, I mean president, is not a bad job.