Monday, April 20, 2009

Obama's hour of truth

Obama's first 100 days are gone. And he has little to show for it. Sure, he spent a lot of money on banks, big companies and other fatcats. But these are Republican voters - not his. For his voters Obama has not much to show.

This reminds me of Clinton. He came to power with a lot of ideals too. But in the end his biggest legacy was a balanced budget - a conservative idea. Sure, a lot of time he had to face a congress with a Republican majority. And he tried but failed with health care insurance. But that doesn't take away that he enthusiastically embraced the balanced budget religion, employed a Secretary of the Treasury with a conservative ideology and presided over a lot of "deregulation".

Together with Clinton you saw similar politicians in other countries. Blair too was a politician from the left who essentially followed a right wing policy (thatcherism with a human face). The effect in both countries on the opposition was the same: seeing their ideology adopted and justified by the left the right wing opposition became even more rightish. Normally this would make them unelectable - as indeed happened in the UK. Unfortunately the clumsiness of Gore and a bit of election fraud combined to give a different result in the US: 8 years with Bush.

Not only gave Obama a lot of money to the rich guys, he also absolved Bush's torturers and hasn't started any prosecution for the many financial abuses of the last decades.

Recently it looks like Obama is finally understanding that his voters want something too. He has proposed to address credit card abuses and to take the middle man out of student loans. The latter would save the government billions but the industry is already fighting back. In a third battle, about rules for unionizing it looks like Obama is losing.

In the mean time America's rich elite - that possesses an even bigger part of the pie as in 1929 - has started a new attack on social security under the pretext that all those billions of aid have to be compensated somewhere.

But real financial reform stays off-limit for Obama. It seems that a lot of the discussion at the recent G20 was between regulation-first Europeans and stimulus-first (regulation-never) Americans.

What also strikes the attention is Obama's lack of political acumen. The smart thing would be to have some popular proposals that would raise resistance among some representatives. It would place them for the choice: support Obama or to face a serious backlash among their supporters. Roosevelt in 1933 managed this very cleverly, but I haven't seen this done by Obama yet. The student loans or the increase of taxes for the richest look like a good opportunities. But somehow Obama seems to fail to get it straight. Republicans claim for example that the extra tax for the richest also taxes the middle class. This concerns not only Republican representatives: there are many Democrats too who have drunk too much of the neoconservative coolaid.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"But these are Republican voters - not his"

Republicans are the ones protesting him giving the bailouts to banks/etc. These certainly are not the "Republican voters".

"Clinton.... But in the end his biggest legacy was a balanced budget"

Not even that. He never did balance the budget. He started to come close to it, but never accomplished it. Even in his last year, the national debt increased due to his debt/expenses being higher than the money coming in. That is not balance, nor is it surplus. That is deficit, and increasing debt.

"Unfortunately the clumsiness of Gore and a bit of election fraud combined to give a different result in the US: 8 years with Bush."

Gore attempted to commit election fraud with a scheme to count voteless ballots as Gore ballots. But he failed. So, election fraud ended up not being a factor.

Wim Roffel said...

"Republicans are the ones protesting him giving the bailouts to bank"

Bankers tend to give more money to the Republican Party than to the Democrats. Don't be confused by the noise of the Republican Congress men about Obama's policies. These are the same guys who made much noise about Clinton not having a balanced budget and who then accepted Bush's record deficits without protests. It is just noise to seduce some credible voters. But in the end they will support the policies that their financiers dictate.

Under Clinton government debt as percentage of GDP was decreasing.

"Gore attempted to commit election fraud "
Why do you think the Republicans were so afraid of a recount?

Anonymous said...

"Under Clinton government debt as percentage of GDP was decreasing."

That is a way to spin or cook the fact that Clinton increased the debt a lot, every single year he was in office.

"Why do you think the Republicans were so afraid of a recount?"

They weren't: there were already 3 or 4 recounts by that time. However, the one Gore demanded would have counted ballots without Gore ballots as "Gore votes". Nonetheless, after the Supreme Court threw out his effort to do that, the ballots were checked.... and it turned out that Gore would have still lost had he gotten that recount also. Gore's attempt at election fraud failed.