What Happened to Obama? Incredibly powerful NYTimes Op-Ed from Sunday!

[lib_wit_it]

For those who don't get to DU on the weekends, I'm re-posting tpsbmam's OP
(http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1683311),
just as it times out of the Greatest list.(Hope tpsbmam doesn't mind.)

Drew Weston's incredibly powerful Op-Ed in today's NY Times. It's a must read IMO.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/what-happened-to-obamas-passion.html?pagewanted=4

In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power in the wealthy. That’s what we saw in 1928, and that’s what we see today. At some point that power is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform ensues — and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation’s food supply, and protect America’s land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.


IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.

The truly decisive move that broke the arc of history was his handling of the stimulus. The public was desperate for a leader who would speak with confidence, and they were ready to follow wherever the president led. Yet instead of indicting the economic policies and principles that had just eliminated eight million jobs, in the most damaging of the tic-like gestures of compromise that have become the hallmark of his presidency — and against the advice of multiple Nobel-Prize-winning economists — he backed away from his advisers who proposed a big stimulus, and then diluted it with tax cuts that had already been shown to be inert. The result, as predicted in advance, was a half-stimulus that half-stimulated the economy. That, in turn, led the White House to feel rightly unappreciated for having saved the country from another Great Depression but in the unenviable position of having to argue a counterfactual — that something terrible might have happened had it not half-acted.


More at above link.


ETA: these were all snips and aren't necessarily continuous paragraphs in the op-ed. It was powerful from beginning to end so choosing wasn't easy.

[Ruby the Liberal]

1. I had to read this 3 times last night before it all sunk in.

Dude nailed what I was "thinking" but couldn't clarify enough in my own thoughts much less state.

This is a sobering piece, and I only hope that someone on his staff of advisors took the time to browse through it. I think the good Doctor speaks for many of us and am glad he found the words we couldn't.

[Orrex]

5. Fortunately it's been posted about a dozen different times!

At least twice on DU's front page, in fact!

:rofl:

[CakeGrrl]

2. And a good rebuttal to all the "incredibly powerful" rhetoric

that challenges the piece to deal with the realities of what's been going down, not just the massive head-shrink the author tries to lay down:

http://xpostfactoid.blogspot.com/2011/08/lover-of-fairy-tales-casts-obama-as.html

[tavalon]

3. Yeah, not so much, actually

There is a reason this article is resonating with the left and it isn't because we are slack jawed.

[Proud Public Servant]

4. Loved this piece

What it captured was that sense that America's genuine enthusiasm for Obama in 2009 was about wanting the change he promised, and wanting to be led -- wanting to follow our president as he boldly charted a course for a more perfect union. Instead he settled straight into triangulation and, even if he has accomplished certain things (and he has), he's largely ignored (or been ignorant of? Is that possible?) the profound desires of the significant majority that elected him.

[tularetom]

6. Exactly - the problem was not that the president did not get a real stimulus passed

The problem was that he didn't even try. And by not even trying he moved the debate away from spending and set the tone for all future debates - the extension of the bush tax cuts and the debt ceilng debacle.

Sure, he might have gone down in flames if he had proposed a bigger stimulus package. But he would have established a defensible position that would have made it easier to argue for spending in the future.