Obama Comes Out Swinging

Finally, Obama’s coming out swinging.

In his radio address over the weekend, he recognized that he’s in for a slugfest, and he did not shrink from it.

He called out the insurance industry, and the banking industry, and the oil and gas companies, and then he said, in the plainest English he’s mustered so far: “I know they’re gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this: ‘So am I.’ ”

That was his best FDR impersonation yet, and it’s the toughness he’ll need, not only against these special interests but against their puppets in the Republican Party and their hatemongers on rightwing radio.

For even as Obama was toughening up, there was Rush Limbaugh addressing the conservative faithful, sneering that it wasn’t Obama’s race that bothered him but his politics, though the mere mention of his race had its desired effect on the base, I’m sure.

“He could be a Martian. He could be from Michigan. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me what his race is,” Limbaugh said. “It doesn't matter. He is liberal. That's what matters to me.”

Limbaugh reiterated his hope that Obama fails, qualifying it this time by saying, “if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation.”

In his bombastic and demagogic way, Limbaugh put his finger on the heart of the ideological debate today: the assumption that capitalism and individual liberty are equally to be protected.

But capitalism and freedom are not equally to be valued. Nor do they go hand in hand.

The freedom to be swindled and then foreclosed on, the freedom to be unwittingly unemployed, the freedom to go hungry, the freedom to go without health care—these are not the freedoms we need.

Obama seemed surprised, at his first press conference, that the rightwing was still fighting the New Deal. In essence, that remains the battle today, though.

The apologists of unfettered capitalism, like Limbaugh, still applaud the system, despite its obvious malfunction. They cannot accept a positive role for government in promoting the general welfare, as the Constitution requires. They cannot abide government regulating business, as corrupt and inept as Wall Street and Detroit
have proven to be. And they don’t want FDR’s “freedom from want” to become a reality because they understand that making people desperate to work helps out the boss, who can get away with paying less.

Obama not only needs to remain tough and willing to fight. He needs to be more, not less, ideological. Rather than accept the falsehood that capitalism and freedom go together, as he did in his Inaugural Address (“Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched”), he needs to sever the two. Then Americans can have a real choice between unfettered capitalism and full freedom.