Obama Comes Out Swinging
By Matthew Rothschild, March 2, 2009
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.
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Comments
Ha, the progressive magazine gets a different type of commentor when it gets a link from RCP. You are kind of all over the place with that response; I'm not sure exactly where to go with that other than saying that climate change is reality, yes solving the problem will impose a cost, but not dealing with the problem will create a higher cost. If you don't understand why people think that warming is a problem, you must not have been reading any of the leading science on the issue. Increased hurricane strength, desertification of some areas and flooding in other areas, the spread of infectious disease, the extinction of a wide variety of species, second order impacts including increased social instability and greater ethnic tension in areas (like Africa or Bangladesh) that don't have the political systems to deal with greater instability make for just a beginning list of the problems that will be created by climate change. And yes, getting China and India on board is a major challenge, especially since our per capita emissions are several orders of magnitude higher then theirs, but until recently the U.S. was the bigger obstacle. I don't know you, but if your value system is that you refuse to pay any extra taxes for something that could have devastating impact on future generations all around the world, then I don't think much of your values and I'm glad people like you won't be around to much longer to screw things up for my generation.
If you really think that Obama's economic policy is like Mussolini's, that's cool, everyone has a right to their opinion, no matter how stupid. I'm guessing your a fan of idiotic name-caller Jonah Goldberg? I'll grant you that both Obama and Mussolini's economic policies involve more government intervention in the economy, so to that extent, there's a similarity between them. I'd say Obama's model is a lot closer to a Japanese model of government and corporate cooperative economic planning, and yes also a European social democratic model, although with much more of an emphasis on small business and entrepreneurship then either of those two.
Your generation lived with the deluded view that all economies exist on a spectrum between socialism (its extreme form being the Soviet Union) and capitalism (its extreme form being the United States), measured by degree of government intervention in the economy. The conservatives of the country presumed that the former was evil and the latter was perfect; liberals tended to try and find an area between the two. Models that didn't fit into that spectrum, like the Japanese model which is heavy on government intervention but is not in any sense socialist, just weren't talked about. But that's not the spectrum anymore. Not in an era in which you have major financial corporations and investors begging the government to bail capitalism out of its sins. The world has become more complex than that - or, well, it always ways but now our leading politicians have figured that out. And whining about Obama's policies being socialist is about as relevant as pretending that Islamic fundamentalism is in any meaningful way similar to fascism.
It's the 21st century man. New era, new problems, new solutions.