Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency
by Robert Kuttner
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Manufacturer: Chelsea Green Publishing
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.973
EAN: 9781603580793
ISBN: 1603580794
Label: Chelsea Green Publishing
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 213
Publication Date: 2008-08-25
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Studio: Chelsea Green Publishing
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Can Obama rescue America from the brink?
Comment: Robert Kuttner's advices to Obama in overcoming the crisis that has brought America to the edge are not something new as many US foreign policy experts have done so in the recent past. But such advices were not heeded by the Bush administration until they have landed America into a real crisis situation.
Kuttner may be right in deriding unbridled free trade and the increasing obeisity of the federal government but does not his suggestion for more government intervention in economic spheres lead to the very road that Kuttner so vehemently opposes? The problem with American leaders is that American ideals and values that I'd termed as 'American Cavalcade' in my book, 'Tracing the Eagle's Orbit' were framed within and for an America closetted between the two oceans but the vision of the founding fathers regarding a non-interventionist and a non committed America from a global perspective had been repeatedly violated by successive presidents starting with TR.
So what worked for an isolationist United States under Lincoln or Roosevelt may not work in the third millennium. The role of charisma and leadership works well within a country but international relations are complex issues where it is the American values that are viewed with suspicion. To make matters worse, America of the new century needs the outside world more than vice-versa and hence the need to be more understanding of others.
Obama is an innovative leader and he is well aware of the international scenario and how to lead America through the intricacies of diverse interests of the community of nations. Obama, I think, should align more with its Western allies to stave off a second isolation.
Gautam Maitra
Author of 'Tracing the Eagle's Orbit: Illuminating Insights into Major US Foreign Policies since Independence.'
Customer Rating:
Summary: From the non-economist
Comment: Okay, I'll admit this. I really don't have a strong understanding of the economy. I'm trying, with some of my reading that I've been doing lately (try: The Conscience of a Liberal, to inform myself on the cause of the recent economic disaster, and what to do about it. It's clear, regardless of my understanding of the crisis, that it is a crisis nonetheless. Economist Robert Kuttner has written a very timely and prescient book on this issue called "Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency."
Kuttner, co-founder of the liberal "American Prospect", writes about Obama's position in history of becoming another truly transformative president, in the mold of Lincoln, FDR, and even LBJ (prior to Vietnam). The first couple of chapters of the book address his possible place amongst the greats, arguing the times and the situation call for greatness. He calls for Obama to not govern in the middle, or lead shyly, but to be a truly ambitious leader, for which the situation calls. In listening to Obama, and studying his speeches and campaign, Kuttner believes that Obama has what it takes to become this man.
The next two chapters tend to wallow through some economic theory that, to be honest, some of which flew by me in a fog of misunderstanding. Fortunately, Kuttner must be aware of his audience, and he doesn't spend too much time in that theory. Kuttner does advocate an ambitious spending plan when Obama reaches office, to shore up the economy, and help stablize some people's lives shattered by the mortgage and banking situations. He encourages Democrats not to run as "Republican-lites", meaning not to reinforce ill-begotten Republican theories like "trickle-down economics" by reinforcing the need for constant tax cuts.
I read this book in just a few short hours, and admired its courage and progressiveness in it's thought. Clearly, Obama is going to govern unlike our previous president, by getting viewpoints from many different voices before making his decisions. I would hope that Kuttner's voice is one of them.
Customer Rating:
Summary: very informative
Comment: I found this book to be well written and very interesting and informative. I live in New Zealand so this book also gave me a lot of background information of which I had been unaware. For example Kuttner definitely views Obama as more "mainstream democrat" than I had assumed from the usual media.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A positive assessment for a better future
Comment: Robert Kuttner, the author of this book, has a rare ability to project a current reality forward in time, and surmise the resulting consequences of our present situation. His previous book, "The squandering of America: How the failure of our politics undermines our prosperity" (2007) detailed how the current financial crisis would unfold as a result of too much deregulation. In this book he discusses the ways in which a transformative presidency could address the challenges before our country in the current economic situation. His is a message of both sacrifice and hope. I recommend this book highly to any who have despaired over what our country has become.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Outstanding book on multiple levels
Comment: Ronald Reagan famously (and wrongly) said that government wasn't the solution to the problem; it was the problem. In fact, it is the solution to the problem. We have now suffered through thirty years of a federal government that has been intentionally impaired so that it will not function for the American people, but instead has worked almost exclusively for the needs and whims of big business. And big business isn't the solution to the problem; it is the problem. I've been arguing this with free marketers since the eighties when I engaged in countless debates with University of Chicago business school and economics students while I was a graduate student there. There they unleashed such asinine theories as that moldy oldie, "The private sector can do things more efficiently than the public sector." Well, no. The mess in the attempted rebuilding in Iraq and the Gulf Coast have proven that, if it was ever in doubt (and multiple independent studies have reinforced the common sense idea that the private sector is certainly not more efficient than the public, and is definitely less cost efficient, since they have to figure in a profit margin). The whole trickle down idea, which has been put forth repeatedly over the past century, has been shown to be false over and over and over again. As Will Rogers put in so well in the twenties, some people think gold is like water: put it at the top and it will just trickle down. But, Rogers insisted, gold isn't like water at all. Put it at the top and it just stays there. Which is precisely what has happened in the past thirty years, as real wages of the middle class have lowered, as the wealth has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population (in 1979 29% of the wealth was in the hands of the top 1% of the population, while today around 50% is in the hands of the top 1% -- and comically, 18% of the people in the US believe they are in the top 1%), and those living below the poverty line have increased. The whole idea of a self-regulating and self-correcting free market has been from top to bottom an unmitigated farce for the vast majority of Americans. And that was BEFORE the recent collapse of Wall Street.
Even more than when Robert Kuttner wrote this superb book (which follows other very fine analyses of the economic situation of our economy like EVERYTHING FOR SALE: THE VIRTUES AND LIMITS OF MARKETS and THE SQUANDERING OF AMERICA: HOW THE FAILURE OF OUR POLITICS OUR PROSPERITY), the current economic situation demands and calls out for the kinds of solutions proposed in this book. Unfortunately, 30 years of strongly held self-regulting market ideas have done immense damage to the economy (and it has to be remembered that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton also held versions of the same economic ideas made more popular by Reagan and made ridiculous by George W. Bush -- and before the increasingly heard defense of Reagan be made that while Reagan was a true conservative, Bush is not, please recall that Reagan undersaw larger increases in spending as a part of GDP than Bush, most of it on military spending -- though to his credit, when Reagan saw the massive deficits his economic policy was building up he did the responsible thing and raised taxes). One one-star reviewer of this book mentioned Kuttner's appearance Colmes and Hannity's show. I strongly urge people to go to Youtube and view it. Yes, they called each other names (though Sean Hannity truly is an idiot and he truly does merely ape GOP talking points), but what that reviewer neglected to mention is that Hannity took great exception to Kuttner's claims that the economy was in a dire mess. Hannity insisted that the economy was in great shape, that Bush had performed miracles. This was a couple of days before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and AIG had to seek a $70 billion line of credit from the Fed. My point is that Kuttner absolutely nailed what was wrong with the economy; if anything, the economy was worse than Kuttner said. Hannity was refuted by the events of the next couple of weeks more thoroughly than any TV interviewer (Hannity is right in describing himself as an "interviewer" and not a journalist). Kuttner was completely and utterly vindicated.
The brute fact is that our economy is -- and actually has been -- a mess. Wall Street is collapsing right now, but the quality of life for the bulk of Americans has been gradually eroding for decades. It was not, as Reagan optimistically crowed, dawn in America, but dusk. The next president will come on the scene at one of the most critical moments in American history, not merely at the end of eight miserable years overseen by the worst president in American history, but three decades of government that ignored or neglected the middle class and privileged instead crackpot free market economic pablum. Some take exception that Kuttner assumes that it is only Obama who can be looked to as the bringer of changes; McCain, after all, might win (though that seemed far more likely a month ago, before the implosion of the economy and before Sarah Palin gave a vast number of Americans another reason to vote for Obama). But the brute fact is that McCain truly is just more of the same thing we've seen since Gerald Ford. Though he acknowledged at one point that the knew nothing about economics, what he has said has persistently been the free market party line. Before the collapse of Wall Street, McCain never found a regulation that he liked. For McCain there was no such thing as too much deregulation. So if we want change, Obama is the only game in town. But not just that; he has often spoken of solutions and gestured towards directions that would be definite departures from the past three decades. He has talked of the kinds of ideas that drove United States policy from the beginning of the New Deal until the onset of deregulation and Reaganism, decades that saw some of the greatest decades of economic growth in American history and the greatest expansion of the middle class. We need to go back to what worked and what worked was government using its power to assure that the middle class has a share of the American dream just as the wealthy do. Like Roosevelt put it, America is not better off unless all Americans are better off.
Kuttner lays out a broad and ambitious program of new government programs that would go a long ways towards undoing the unremittant harm inflicted over the past few decades. These include such programs as universal health care and a dramatic increase in the expansion of alternative energy sources.
What has been lost in the unceasing criticism of government by Reagan and his followers is that government has done a vast number of extraordinarily fine things. It has done far less in the past few decades because it has not been allowed to. If people merely reflected a bit instead of succumbing to brainless anti-government rhetoric they would easily think of dozens of tremendous successes by government. Just a few examples of government at work: the national highway system; most of America's bridges; social security (which even Reagan promoted as a very great thing); clean air and clean water; the national park system; medicare and mediaid; food stamps (so people without money will not starve); guaranteeing civil rights, so that blacks voting today don't have to guess how many jelly beans are in a bowl to be able to vote; the space program; the Bill of Rights; consumer protection (that bans products like the over the counter medical product that in the late 1890s killed over a hundred people in about a week); the G.I. Bill; various programs that have enabled most people in American history to own their own homes; the control of the national water supply (otherwise there would be no one living in California); the National Institutes of Health; the breaking up of the Mafia; and a vast number of other programs and achievements. Anti-government ideologues want to pretend that there are no options other than an all-inclusive totalitarianism and a do-nothing libertarianism, but all of the countries in Europe and Canada that enjoy a better quality of life than we do in the United States (every year the U.S. slips further and further down the list of the countries with the highest quality of life) prove them otherwise. We need government officials that actually believe in government again. We need to get back on track.
Many will be resistant to the kinds of ideas that are put forward in Kuttner's book because they have been steeped in the simplistic and easy-to-digest and parrot ideology put forward on the right from Reagan to the present. One of Reagan's most dubious achievements was convincing people that there were simple answers to complex problems. Yet the world remained complex while people's thinking about it became increasingly simplistic and out of touch. The free market mantra was an incredibly easy one to understand and apply. That it never worked successfully in any country in which it was tried never bothered these people. As Karl Polanyi presciently pointed out in 1944 in his great book THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION (directed at the Viennese School economists who were the teachers of Milton Friedman and other U.S. free marketers and still one of the best and most relevant books ever written about economics), a belief in the virtues of a radically free market is essentially utopian: it does not describe a world that ever has or ever could exist, but one that they could only imagine to exist. We need to get back to a nuanced way of thinking about politics and economics that addresses the way the world actually is, not the way that people imagine it should be. It is only a matter of time that the free marketers resume their mantra of laissez-faire and deregulation. Polanyi said that their response to any economic failures, even when the policies were put forward by true believers in the free market, would be to insist that the principles had not been sufficiently adopted by society, that the markets hadn't been sufficiently free, that there had still been too many regulations. It is pure hogwash, but a position that anyone with a high school education can adopt and apply.
If it sounds like I'm angry, I am. I hate that most of my adult life has been lived in a country that has become the testing ground for so many hare-brained ideas and crack pot nostrums. Not everything was perfect in the United States from the early thirties to the seventies, and there were times when there was a tremendous suppression of individual liberties in the country (though mainly by people who later would be most seduced by the kinds of thinking I've been criticizing in this review). But the middle class was expanding and for a huge number of Americans life made far more sense economically than it does today. What I would like to see is an America with the kinds of social and cultural progress made in the past three decades (with far greater racial tolerance as well as acceptance of all kinds of difference, whether religious or sexual orientation, and a true embrace of gender equality) with the kind of growth of the middle class that took place in the decades before Reagan. Like Roosevelt said, America isn't well off unless most Americans are well off. That is Obama's challenge, to put America back on the path down which we were led by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, and even Nixon. The pro-big business, anti-middle class policies of Carter, Reagan (especially Reagan), Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 have got to go.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Can Obama rescue America from the brink?
Comment: Robert Kuttner's advices to Obama in overcoming the crisis that has brought America to the edge are not something new as many US foreign policy experts have done so in the recent past. But such advices were not heeded by the Bush administration until they have landed America into a real crisis situation.
Kuttner may be right in deriding unbridled free trade and the increasing obeisity of the federal government but does not his suggestion for more government intervention in economic spheres lead to the very road that Kuttner so vehemently opposes? The problem with American leaders is that American ideals and values that I'd termed as 'American Cavalcade' in my book, 'Tracing the Eagle's Orbit' were framed within and for an America closetted between the two oceans but the vision of the founding fathers regarding a non-interventionist and a non committed America from a global perspective had been repeatedly violated by successive presidents starting with TR.
So what worked for an isolationist United States under Lincoln or Roosevelt may not work in the third millennium. The role of charisma and leadership works well within a country but international relations are complex issues where it is the American values that are viewed with suspicion. To make matters worse, America of the new century needs the outside world more than vice-versa and hence the need to be more understanding of others.
Obama is an innovative leader and he is well aware of the international scenario and how to lead America through the intricacies of diverse interests of the community of nations. Obama, I think, should align more with its Western allies to stave off a second isolation.
Gautam Maitra
Author of 'Tracing the Eagle's Orbit: Illuminating Insights into Major US Foreign Policies since Independence.'
Customer Rating:
Summary: From the non-economist
Comment: Okay, I'll admit this. I really don't have a strong understanding of the economy. I'm trying, with some of my reading that I've been doing lately (try: The Conscience of a Liberal, to inform myself on the cause of the recent economic disaster, and what to do about it. It's clear, regardless of my understanding of the crisis, that it is a crisis nonetheless. Economist Robert Kuttner has written a very timely and prescient book on this issue called "Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency."
Kuttner, co-founder of the liberal "American Prospect", writes about Obama's position in history of becoming another truly transformative president, in the mold of Lincoln, FDR, and even LBJ (prior to Vietnam). The first couple of chapters of the book address his possible place amongst the greats, arguing the times and the situation call for greatness. He calls for Obama to not govern in the middle, or lead shyly, but to be a truly ambitious leader, for which the situation calls. In listening to Obama, and studying his speeches and campaign, Kuttner believes that Obama has what it takes to become this man.
The next two chapters tend to wallow through some economic theory that, to be honest, some of which flew by me in a fog of misunderstanding. Fortunately, Kuttner must be aware of his audience, and he doesn't spend too much time in that theory. Kuttner does advocate an ambitious spending plan when Obama reaches office, to shore up the economy, and help stablize some people's lives shattered by the mortgage and banking situations. He encourages Democrats not to run as "Republican-lites", meaning not to reinforce ill-begotten Republican theories like "trickle-down economics" by reinforcing the need for constant tax cuts.
I read this book in just a few short hours, and admired its courage and progressiveness in it's thought. Clearly, Obama is going to govern unlike our previous president, by getting viewpoints from many different voices before making his decisions. I would hope that Kuttner's voice is one of them.
Customer Rating:
Summary: very informative
Comment: I found this book to be well written and very interesting and informative. I live in New Zealand so this book also gave me a lot of background information of which I had been unaware. For example Kuttner definitely views Obama as more "mainstream democrat" than I had assumed from the usual media.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A positive assessment for a better future
Comment: Robert Kuttner, the author of this book, has a rare ability to project a current reality forward in time, and surmise the resulting consequences of our present situation. His previous book, "The squandering of America: How the failure of our politics undermines our prosperity" (2007) detailed how the current financial crisis would unfold as a result of too much deregulation. In this book he discusses the ways in which a transformative presidency could address the challenges before our country in the current economic situation. His is a message of both sacrifice and hope. I recommend this book highly to any who have despaired over what our country has become.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Outstanding book on multiple levels
Comment: Ronald Reagan famously (and wrongly) said that government wasn't the solution to the problem; it was the problem. In fact, it is the solution to the problem. We have now suffered through thirty years of a federal government that has been intentionally impaired so that it will not function for the American people, but instead has worked almost exclusively for the needs and whims of big business. And big business isn't the solution to the problem; it is the problem. I've been arguing this with free marketers since the eighties when I engaged in countless debates with University of Chicago business school and economics students while I was a graduate student there. There they unleashed such asinine theories as that moldy oldie, "The private sector can do things more efficiently than the public sector." Well, no. The mess in the attempted rebuilding in Iraq and the Gulf Coast have proven that, if it was ever in doubt (and multiple independent studies have reinforced the common sense idea that the private sector is certainly not more efficient than the public, and is definitely less cost efficient, since they have to figure in a profit margin). The whole trickle down idea, which has been put forth repeatedly over the past century, has been shown to be false over and over and over again. As Will Rogers put in so well in the twenties, some people think gold is like water: put it at the top and it will just trickle down. But, Rogers insisted, gold isn't like water at all. Put it at the top and it just stays there. Which is precisely what has happened in the past thirty years, as real wages of the middle class have lowered, as the wealth has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population (in 1979 29% of the wealth was in the hands of the top 1% of the population, while today around 50% is in the hands of the top 1% -- and comically, 18% of the people in the US believe they are in the top 1%), and those living below the poverty line have increased. The whole idea of a self-regulating and self-correcting free market has been from top to bottom an unmitigated farce for the vast majority of Americans. And that was BEFORE the recent collapse of Wall Street.
Even more than when Robert Kuttner wrote this superb book (which follows other very fine analyses of the economic situation of our economy like EVERYTHING FOR SALE: THE VIRTUES AND LIMITS OF MARKETS and THE SQUANDERING OF AMERICA: HOW THE FAILURE OF OUR POLITICS OUR PROSPERITY), the current economic situation demands and calls out for the kinds of solutions proposed in this book. Unfortunately, 30 years of strongly held self-regulting market ideas have done immense damage to the economy (and it has to be remembered that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton also held versions of the same economic ideas made more popular by Reagan and made ridiculous by George W. Bush -- and before the increasingly heard defense of Reagan be made that while Reagan was a true conservative, Bush is not, please recall that Reagan undersaw larger increases in spending as a part of GDP than Bush, most of it on military spending -- though to his credit, when Reagan saw the massive deficits his economic policy was building up he did the responsible thing and raised taxes). One one-star reviewer of this book mentioned Kuttner's appearance Colmes and Hannity's show. I strongly urge people to go to Youtube and view it. Yes, they called each other names (though Sean Hannity truly is an idiot and he truly does merely ape GOP talking points), but what that reviewer neglected to mention is that Hannity took great exception to Kuttner's claims that the economy was in a dire mess. Hannity insisted that the economy was in great shape, that Bush had performed miracles. This was a couple of days before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and AIG had to seek a $70 billion line of credit from the Fed. My point is that Kuttner absolutely nailed what was wrong with the economy; if anything, the economy was worse than Kuttner said. Hannity was refuted by the events of the next couple of weeks more thoroughly than any TV interviewer (Hannity is right in describing himself as an "interviewer" and not a journalist). Kuttner was completely and utterly vindicated.
The brute fact is that our economy is -- and actually has been -- a mess. Wall Street is collapsing right now, but the quality of life for the bulk of Americans has been gradually eroding for decades. It was not, as Reagan optimistically crowed, dawn in America, but dusk. The next president will come on the scene at one of the most critical moments in American history, not merely at the end of eight miserable years overseen by the worst president in American history, but three decades of government that ignored or neglected the middle class and privileged instead crackpot free market economic pablum. Some take exception that Kuttner assumes that it is only Obama who can be looked to as the bringer of changes; McCain, after all, might win (though that seemed far more likely a month ago, before the implosion of the economy and before Sarah Palin gave a vast number of Americans another reason to vote for Obama). But the brute fact is that McCain truly is just more of the same thing we've seen since Gerald Ford. Though he acknowledged at one point that the knew nothing about economics, what he has said has persistently been the free market party line. Before the collapse of Wall Street, McCain never found a regulation that he liked. For McCain there was no such thing as too much deregulation. So if we want change, Obama is the only game in town. But not just that; he has often spoken of solutions and gestured towards directions that would be definite departures from the past three decades. He has talked of the kinds of ideas that drove United States policy from the beginning of the New Deal until the onset of deregulation and Reaganism, decades that saw some of the greatest decades of economic growth in American history and the greatest expansion of the middle class. We need to go back to what worked and what worked was government using its power to assure that the middle class has a share of the American dream just as the wealthy do. Like Roosevelt put it, America is not better off unless all Americans are better off.
Kuttner lays out a broad and ambitious program of new government programs that would go a long ways towards undoing the unremittant harm inflicted over the past few decades. These include such programs as universal health care and a dramatic increase in the expansion of alternative energy sources.
What has been lost in the unceasing criticism of government by Reagan and his followers is that government has done a vast number of extraordinarily fine things. It has done far less in the past few decades because it has not been allowed to. If people merely reflected a bit instead of succumbing to brainless anti-government rhetoric they would easily think of dozens of tremendous successes by government. Just a few examples of government at work: the national highway system; most of America's bridges; social security (which even Reagan promoted as a very great thing); clean air and clean water; the national park system; medicare and mediaid; food stamps (so people without money will not starve); guaranteeing civil rights, so that blacks voting today don't have to guess how many jelly beans are in a bowl to be able to vote; the space program; the Bill of Rights; consumer protection (that bans products like the over the counter medical product that in the late 1890s killed over a hundred people in about a week); the G.I. Bill; various programs that have enabled most people in American history to own their own homes; the control of the national water supply (otherwise there would be no one living in California); the National Institutes of Health; the breaking up of the Mafia; and a vast number of other programs and achievements. Anti-government ideologues want to pretend that there are no options other than an all-inclusive totalitarianism and a do-nothing libertarianism, but all of the countries in Europe and Canada that enjoy a better quality of life than we do in the United States (every year the U.S. slips further and further down the list of the countries with the highest quality of life) prove them otherwise. We need government officials that actually believe in government again. We need to get back on track.
Many will be resistant to the kinds of ideas that are put forward in Kuttner's book because they have been steeped in the simplistic and easy-to-digest and parrot ideology put forward on the right from Reagan to the present. One of Reagan's most dubious achievements was convincing people that there were simple answers to complex problems. Yet the world remained complex while people's thinking about it became increasingly simplistic and out of touch. The free market mantra was an incredibly easy one to understand and apply. That it never worked successfully in any country in which it was tried never bothered these people. As Karl Polanyi presciently pointed out in 1944 in his great book THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION (directed at the Viennese School economists who were the teachers of Milton Friedman and other U.S. free marketers and still one of the best and most relevant books ever written about economics), a belief in the virtues of a radically free market is essentially utopian: it does not describe a world that ever has or ever could exist, but one that they could only imagine to exist. We need to get back to a nuanced way of thinking about politics and economics that addresses the way the world actually is, not the way that people imagine it should be. It is only a matter of time that the free marketers resume their mantra of laissez-faire and deregulation. Polanyi said that their response to any economic failures, even when the policies were put forward by true believers in the free market, would be to insist that the principles had not been sufficiently adopted by society, that the markets hadn't been sufficiently free, that there had still been too many regulations. It is pure hogwash, but a position that anyone with a high school education can adopt and apply.
If it sounds like I'm angry, I am. I hate that most of my adult life has been lived in a country that has become the testing ground for so many hare-brained ideas and crack pot nostrums. Not everything was perfect in the United States from the early thirties to the seventies, and there were times when there was a tremendous suppression of individual liberties in the country (though mainly by people who later would be most seduced by the kinds of thinking I've been criticizing in this review). But the middle class was expanding and for a huge number of Americans life made far more sense economically than it does today. What I would like to see is an America with the kinds of social and cultural progress made in the past three decades (with far greater racial tolerance as well as acceptance of all kinds of difference, whether religious or sexual orientation, and a true embrace of gender equality) with the kind of growth of the middle class that took place in the decades before Reagan. Like Roosevelt said, America isn't well off unless most Americans are well off. That is Obama's challenge, to put America back on the path down which we were led by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, and even Nixon. The pro-big business, anti-middle class policies of Carter, Reagan (especially Reagan), Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 have got to go.
Barack Obama approaches the Presidency at a critical moment in American history, facing simultaneous crises of war, the environment, health care, but most especially in the economy. If he is able to rise to the moment, he could join the ranks of a small handful of previous presidents who have been truly transformative, succeeding in fundamentally changing our economy, society, and democracy for the better.But this will require imaginative and decisive action as Obama takes office, action bolder than he has promised during his campaign, and will be all the more difficult given the undertow of conventional wisdom in Washington and on Wall Street that resists fundamental change. Decades of regressive politics and political gridlock have left America in its most precarious situation since the onset of the Great Depression. The collapse of the housing bubble continues, as does the financial meltdown it triggered; a revival of 1970s style stagflation threatens; incomes continue to lag behind inflation; our household and international debts pile higher; disastrous climate change looms; energy and food prices continue their escalation; and the ranks of un- and under-insured Americans grow, the clearest, and most heartless, example of America’s destructive inequalities.Solutions to our multiple challenges do exist, but they won’t be found in overly cautious or expedient quick fixes. With his exceptional skill at appealing to our better angels, Barack Obama could be the right leader at the right time to re-awaken America to the renewed promise of shared prosperity coupled with responsibility towards future generations and the international community with whom we share the Earth. Invoking America’s greatest leaders, Robert Kuttner explains how Obama must be a transformative president—or a failed one.
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