Those of us on the left have had some serious problems with our president. He compromised too much, he wasn’t forceful, he wasn’t the agent of change we thought he would be. Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, has written a new book (Pity the Billionaire) accusing Obama of being the friend of the plutocrats who cavort on Wall Street.
He quotes a portion of Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope about “people of means” whom Obama met at fundraisers. Here’s that portion:
As a rule they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable abut public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing...in exchange for their checks. .... They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by by the movements of global capital. ... Frank notes that Obama then wrote that as he hung around with these people, he became more like them.
Damning words, right?
But here is what Michael Kinsley said in a review of Frank’s book:
It seems to me that a Democratic president who gets us health care reform and tough new financial protection for consumers, who guides the economy through its roughest period in 80 years with moderate success (who could do better?), who ends our long war in Iraq and avenges the worst insult to our sovereignty since Pearl Harbor (as his Republican predecessor manifestly failed to do, despite a lot of noise and promises); a president who faced an opposition of really spectacular intransigence and down-right meanness; a president who has the self-knowledge and wisdom about Washington to write the passage quoted above, and the courage to publish it: that president deserves a bit more credit from the left than Frank is willing to give him.
I agree.
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