Obama's Bad Bank Plan Could Destroy His Promising Presidency -- How Do We Push Him in the Right Direction?

By Robert Kuttner, Huffington Post. Posted April 14, 2009.

It ain't easy to play the role of loyal opposition to a progressive president who seems determined at times to be captured by Wall Street.


"Part of the Way with LBJ" --Students for a Democratic Society button, circa 1964

Progressives now find themselves in an awkward position of simultaneously wishing Barack Obama well, but feeling dismayed by his policies on some key issues, most notably the banking bailout. If this were a normal economic situation, the posture of semi-opposition would not be that big a deal. We would simply gratefully accept the decent policies and keep pressing for bolder ones. But a failure to revive the banking system would be Obama's Vietnam. It would wreck everything else.

It's a too-familiar position for progressives, one that winds back through all of the postwar Democratic administrations of my adulthood. We wanted Lyndon Johnson to push harder for civil rights and anti-poverty and not ruin it all in Vietnam. We were appalled at Jimmy Carter's attacks on government, his failure to use his large Democratic majority in Congress to press for progressive legislation, his refusal to lift a finger on behalf of labor law reform. The memories of Bill Clinton are sufficiently recent that we need little reminder of the needless tilt to the right on economic issues from NAFTA to welfare reform to financial deregulation.

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I'm afraid I have zero confidence in Obama's financial rescue plan. He's just trying to keep the Ponzi Scheme going. Hoping for a miracle. Tom