HE JUST NEEDS THE PROGRAM UPDATE:

Can Obama be deprogrammed?: The president is a prisoner of the cult of neoliberalism (Michael Lind, Aug. 04, 2009, Salon)

Boy, do we need deprogrammers now, to liberate Barack Obama from the cult of neoliberalism.

By neoliberalism I mean the ideology that replaced New Deal liberalism as the dominant force in the Democratic Party between the Carter and Clinton presidencies. In the Clinton years, this was called the "Third Way." [...]

A growing number of Democratic economists and economic policymakers were attracted to the revival of free-market economics, among them Obama's chief economic advisor Larry Summers, a professed admirer of Milton Friedman. These center-right Democrats agreed with the libertarians that the New Deal approach to the economy had been too interventionist. At the same time, they thought that government had a role in providing a safety net. The result was what came to be called "neoliberalism" in the 1980s and 1990s -- a synthesis of conservative free-market economics with "progressive" welfare-state redistribution for the losers. Its institutional base was the Democratic Leadership Council, headed by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and the affiliated Progressive Policy Institute. [...]

By the time Barack Obama was inaugurated, the neoliberal capture of the presidential branch of the Democratic Party was complete. Instead of presiding over an administration with diverse economic views, Obama froze out progressives, except for Jared Bernstein in the vice-president's office, and surrounded himself with neoliberal protégés of Robert Rubin like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. The fact that Robert Rubin's son James helped select Obama's economic team may not be irrelevant.

Actually, were the UR to push a Third Way universal health care program, one based on HSAs with subsidies for those who can't afford them--and then go for SS privatization next term--he'd have a shot at a truly historic presidency. In the meantime, privatizing unemployment insurance and passing O'Neill Accounts would be fairly easy steps towards Thatcherization.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2009 8:24 AM