President Obama may have many faults, but not being a spokesperson for Liberalism is not one of them. Three years later, Eric Alterman forgets everything Obama has done and blames him for everything he hasn’t done.
In fact, Obama has proved far more adept at adapting his positions toward the increasingly radical views enunciated by the leaders of the Republican Party than he has in articulating — and sticking to — an alternative vision of the role of government in ensuring a fair economic shake for all its citizens.
He asked the right question on Tuesday when he said: “Can we succeed as a country where a shrinking number of people do exceedingly well, while a growing number struggle to get by? Or are we better off when everyone gets a fair shot?” But as liberals have repeatedly learned to their dismay, the devil is not in the poetry of the president’s election-time rhetoric but in the prose of his apparent eagerness to seek out a compromise on almost any Republican proposal offered him. Liberals have spent decades trying to adjudicate the claims of their conflicting constituencies without focusing sharply enough on the economic well-being of a broad section of Americans. A fight for fairness and equity could unite the working poor and middle class in a winning coalition for the future, but the problem today for liberals is less the message itself than the credibility of the messenger.
While signaling his support for much if not all of liberalism’s cultural agenda, President Obama has occasionally tossed economic liberals a rhetorical bone — but he has also worried too much about deficit reduction. In this regard, Obama embodies the unsolved liberal conundrum. Were the president to embrace a genuinely populist economic agenda and mean it this time — just as Franklin D. Roosevelt did in his second term — he might go a long way toward solving the problem that has dogged liberalism now for nearly half a century.