RIGHT FACTS, WRONG CONCLUSION:

Nov. 2: The Death Knell of Corporate Liberalism (Matthew Rothschild, November 3, 2010, The Progressive)

Example: health care. He didn’t call people to march on Washington for universal health care, or at least Medicare for all who want it. So a few tea party hucksters were able to hijack the debate. He didn’t even push Harry Reid to give the health care bill to Senator Tom Harkin’s committee, throwing it instead into the untrustworthy arms of Max Baucus.

As a result, an inferior law came on the books with some important insurance reforms in it, but it didn’t threaten the private health care providers or the pharmaceutical companies. And it didn’t deliver the immediate relief that most Americans needed.

On the jobs front, he refused to follow the lead of Christina Romer, head of his Council of Economic Advisers, or the recommendations of Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. All three said he needed a stimulus package that was at least 50 percent larger than the one he proposed. Nor did he propose a new WPA, like FDR did when the country faced a similar, if not quite so staggering, free fall. Obama was afraid to come on too strong. So he came on too weak.

Same on the banking front. Obama could have, and should have, nationalized Bank of America and Citibank, or at the very least, compelled them to halt foreclosures and write down the principal on all their mortgages by 25 or 30 percent. But Obama didn’t get anything from the banks in exchange for the hundreds of billions of dollars the Treasury doled out, and the trillions in guarantees. And so the bankers laughed all the way to the vault, and even some Republicans scored by running commercials against Democrats who voted for the bailout.

Same on the environment. Obama sold out the cause at Copenhagen, and with amazingly bad timing he came out for offshore drilling just weeks before the BP disaster, in hopes, again, of getting concessions from Republicans and from industry. [...]

They lived by corporate liberalism. And Democrats around the country died by it.

The point is that the Democrats had to govern like Republicans because it's a conservative country.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 4, 2010 5:02 AM