While we prepare for Twitler and his minions, it’s time to address what Dems need to take back to win elections before this becomes our future.
I can relate to this article on Obama’s financial policies and their legacy. While I will miss this man in the White House dearly, it is hard to express my level of frustration with him and Democratic leaders in general on financial policies that excuse the behavior of the powerful at the expense of the average American. He had several opportunities during his Presidency to help the working class and passed them up just as often as President Clinton did and with even more effect because we didn’t have the tech bubble.
But Obama can’t place the blame for Clinton’s poor performance purely on her campaign. On the contrary, the past eight years of policymaking have damaged Democrats at all levels. Recovering Democratic strength will require the party’s leaders to come to terms with what it has become — and the role Obama played in bringing it to this point.
Two key elements characterized the kind of domestic political economy the administration pursued: The first was the foreclosure crisis and the subsequent bank bailouts. The resulting policy framework of Tim Geithner’s Treasury Department was, in effect, a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power. The second was the administration’s pro-monopoly policies, which crushed the rural areas that in 2016 lost voter turnout and swung to Donald Trump.
Obama didn’t cause the financial panic, and he is only partially responsible for the bailouts, as most of them were passed before he was elected. But financial collapses, while bad for the country, are opportunities for elected leaders to reorganize our culture. Franklin Roosevelt took a frozen banking system and created the New Deal. Ronald Reagan used the sharp recession of the early 1980s to seriously damage unions. In January 2009, Obama had overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress, $350 billion of no-strings-attached bailout money and enormous legal latitude. What did he do to reshape a country on its back?
I won’t quote more, but please read it. It’s time for Democrats to get serious about supporting the middle class and not govern by protecting multinational corporations from their own screw ups at the expense of the people that end up paying the price. When people lose their jobs and their homes it doesn’t help to say how much better Dems are because they are the only ones who hand out rebates and food stamps.
On a related note: