Robert Reich is right. People are fed up with the system. They're fed up with a system which defines the American dream as an eight figure salary, four beach front houses, two Ferraris, a BMW, and a corporate jet. They're fed up with a system where people who failed at their job are rewarded with generous bonuses and luxurious travel junkets to exclusive resorts. This is a problem which will hang over Barack Obama's Presidency.
The people have had enough. We don't begrudge others earning a decent wage, buying and home and sending their kids to college. We do begrudge others earning billions of dollars in bonuses, stashing their money away in savings accounts, and shrugging their shoulders as millions of innocent victims are laid off and lose their health insurance.
We don't begrudge someone taking a week's vacation at the beach. We don't begrudge them staying in a beach front motel, eating out, reading on the beach, and cooling off in the ocean. We do begrudge them building a mansion the size of a hotel for themselves, closing off public access to the ocean by their "vacation home," and ruining the area for everybody else.
We don't begrudge someone the right to go out to eat once in a while. But we're irritated when the corporate elite spends hundreds of dollars per person on a meal, when the same thing could've been had at our favorite local steak house for $20. We don't begrudge people the right to travel on business, but we're annoyed by private jet travel, which pollutes our air, clogs our airways, and delays our flight home to visit our Mother.
We don't begrudge someone the right to earn a year-end bonus. But when that bonus is earned by denying an ill person a life-saving treatment, then we begrudge that. Further, when the rich and powerful can choose their doctors and be seen immediately, but the poor have to wait in health care lotto rooms, we feel devalued. The fundamental right of every human being to live a healthy life has been forgotten by those who bought into the excessive greed that has permeated corporate hallways over the past 8 years.
The American dream is a fundamentally modest dream. What I would give for a $30,000 a year job, employer paid health insurance, and the ability to buy my own house. Maybe I could have children and be able to send them to college in time. So when I hear Wall Street executives complaining that they will not be able to find employees to do jobs for $500,000 a year, I want to know where to send my resume. Heck, I'll work for 1/20th of that salary, as long as health insurance comes with it.
But President Barack Obama faces a larger challenge than finding people who are willing to work on the cheap. He has to negotiate a fine line between reacting to the public--which is so disillusioned with corporate greed, excess, and arrogance that it now favors extremely progressive policies (see: 2008 election results)--and Wall Street, which doesn't want to have its notion of what is fair questioned. Barack Obama is going to have to take the corporate jets, eight figure salaries, and luxury cars away from Wall Street if he is to be re-elected.
At the same time, to get fundamental changes through the halls of Washington, Barack Obama is going to have to be part of the system. He's going to have to go to exclusive dinners and cocktail parties; there he will have to schmooze with the rich and the powerful, who still (sadly) hold the levers of government in the palms of their hands.
The risks are extremely high and the traps are countless. If Obama is seen as enjoying the high life in a time of war and national sacrifice, his credibility with an angry public will be shot. If Obama sides with the angry masses and ditches the system completely, legislative failure after legislative failure will follow. President Obama is on a tight rope; if he falls, there will continue to be rising inequality, more Americans will face the indignities of needing medical care without insurance, of losing their jobs and their homes, and of telling their kids that college just isn't right at the moment. If he succeeds, and if we return modesty to the American dream, then our country can regain the economic preeminence it once possessed.