credibility - Represent Consumers

Left, right and left out

On so many issues related to the state of our economic recovery, current notions of liberal and conservative don’t seem to apply.

For example, should we allow a real free market to work in our financial system?

Should we crack down hard on those Wall Street bankers who broke the law?

Should companies that want to foreclose on property have to follow the law?

If you’re in favor of real financial free market, tough law enforcement and following the law, are you conservative or liberal, left or right?

What you are is in the majority, and the most important political designation in the U.S. in 2012 – left out.

Your views are reflected only rarely in the political debate at all and never in the presidential debate. Sure, President Obama has repeatedly promised to get tough on Wall Street, most recently in the state of the union in January, but based on the results, those promises have little credibility. President Obama preaches for an activist role for government with the occasional populist flourish, but that impulse wilts if Republicans or campaign funders show the least resistance.

His opponent, Mitt Romney, considers any crackdown on Wall Street an affront to the beloved job creators to whom we should all be bowing down – even if they don’t actually use their wealth to create any decent jobs.

What we get instead of a real debate on how to get an economy that works for ordinary folks is a faux argument over the role of venture capitalist tycoons, between the candidate who used to be one and our president, who has relied on them a key source of campaign funding as much as Romney has.

What we get is the fiscal cliff drama about whether or not to shut down the government.

What we get is each side offering scary versions of what the other will do.

What we get are Mitt Romney’s assurances that if we just get the regulators out of the way, the wealthy job creators will get to work, regardless of whether anybody can afford to buy their products.

What we get is the president’s half-measures and handwringing. But it’s all political theater that doesn’t replace real jobs, real plans to revive housing and keep people in their homes and real accountability for bankers. It doesn’t replace a real debate about the role of big money in overshadowing those issues in our elections. Right now, both sides have left those out of their campaigns.

Politics is a team activity and our natural tendency is to root for our guy, downplay his flaws, and point out how much worse the other guy would be. But this election should not just be rooting for our team and beating the other guy. It should not be about rooting for our guy we’re so hyped up about how scary the other guy is.

It should be about who is willing to confront the big money, not bend to it.

It should be about who can really get people back to work, keep us in our homes, guide an economic recovery that’s not just for the wealthiest.

We should demand that we’re more than just a rooting section for our team, that our bread and butter concerns are not left out.

Obama's 'Hostage' Crisis

Tonight’s state of the union speech will be the least important of President Barack Obama's political career. No doubt it will be a dazzling performance, as the president pivots from pugilistic to professorial, from left to right. We know the president comes through with the rhetoric in the clutch. But the true test of his presidency is no longer what he says he will do or how he says it.

The test is whether Obama and his team wage a credible and effective fight for financial reform and economy recovery for Main Street, with the same vigor and urgency they threw into the Wall Street bailout. That will take more than a speech or even a series of speeches. It will take a real self-critical assessment of the president's strategy up til now and a tough, savvy and sustained political battle plan in the face of significant obstacles.

Both have been lacking in the president's approach so far. That’s the real pivot he needs to make now, and it has only partly to do with oratorical skills.

Obama’s credibility is suffering because he and his team keep suggesting that they have overseen a recovery that most people aren’t enjoying. They helped engineer a bailout that they say was absolutely necessary that helped the financial sector but left out the rest of us. Obama and his team don’t have credibility because they’re working Capitol Hill as hard as they can, not to create jobs for millions of out of work Americans, but to save the job of one of the few Americans who could have helped forestall both the financial crisis and the Wall Street –friendly bailout but didn’t, Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve.

Sen. Tom Harkin summed up what many people are feeling in reacting to comments from Tim Geithner, Obama’s treasury secretary who had warned that the stock market would tumble if Bernanke were not confirmed.

Geithner was just acting as a messenger boy for Wall Street, Harkin suggested. “How long will our economic policy be held hostage to Wall Street who threaten us that there’ll be total collapse if we don’t do everything they want? Wall Street wants Bernanke,” Harkin said. “They’re sending all these signals there’ll be this total collapse if he’s not approved. You know, I’m tired of being held hostage by Wall Street.”

Wall Street doesn’t like key planks of the president’s financial reform plan, like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and his recently announced plan to separate some of the largest bank’s risky business from its more traditional functions. The Senate’s banking committee chair, Christopher Dodd has signaled he’s ready to surrender on the consumer protection agency. Will the president announce tonight how he and his team plan to win that fight when congressional leaders are giving up? Or will the president treat the consumer protection agency and bank size as just details that should be left up to Congress, as he did in the battle over crucial aspects of health care reform?

A different kind of hostage crisis helped bring down a previous Democratic president. All Jimmy Carter had to grapple with were a bunch of Iranian revolutionaries holding 53 Americans in an embassy in Tehran. President Obama’s challenge is much tougher – 250 million people and our entire political process held hostage by some of the world’s wealthiest corporations and individuals. Carter’s hands were tied. Are Obama’s?