Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren know that Barack Obama is admired by the vast majority of Democrats, and that attacking him would be electoral suicide, so they don’t. Their surrogates, however, have no such qualms. And so, we have a column in today’s NYT which accuses Obama of being a “neo-liberal” who blew a great opportunity to remake the American economic and political systems. At least it didn’t call him an Uncle Tom; the author is probably leaving that for Ta-Nehisi Coates.
There are three major errors in the column:
- OBAMA DIDN’T RUN TO BRING US THE “REVOLUTION”: He has been accurately described as a liberal Republican from the 1960’s or the early 1970’s. There was nothing in his campaign which suggested he was trying to reshape our political and economic system any more than Hillary Clinton was.
- OBAMA HAD TO PRIORITIZE ECONOMIC RECOVERY OVER DEALING WITH INEQUALITY: Bashing bankers and businessmen was not exactly a great way to rebuild confidence in a tottering system during a crisis. If he had focused more on helping the little guy than on keeping the country afloat, the poor would have wound up with a larger slice of a much smaller pie, which would not have improved their lot at all.
- HE DID EVERYTHING THAT WAS POLITICALLY FEASIBLE: Joe Lieberman was willing to tank Obamacare over the public option. Do you really think he was going to vote for a “revolution?”