OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

[T]he TPP could well be President Obama's most enduring legacy, because it gives his corporatism its biggest stage yet. It captures the central idea of his presidency -- that when big government and big business make policy, the result is good for average Americans, even if it reduces their political freedom, or even their political participation. ObamaCare laid that marker down domestically, triggering a lightning round of health industry consolidation that turned the "big five" insurers -- and their $346 billion yearly revenues -- into a "big three." The math is simple: When everyone has to buy the products dominant corporations sell, dominant corporations win. From a liberals' standpoint, TPP takes the idea global -- allowing powerful international corporations to further disadvantage American workers through a complex set of legal, financial, and economic privileges. As Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) put it: "The administration has put big business first, [and] workers, communities, and small businesses last."

And for once, the left doesn't know what to do about it.

The administration has long been able to get liberals to support just about anything if it panders enough to the base's brand of identity politics. (The same has happened on the right for generations.) So, as long as Obama appeased the left's social-justice sensibility, he has been able to focus on advancing his corporatist agenda -- what The New Republic senior editor Noam Scheiber rather obliquely termed "boardroom liberalism."

"It's a worldview that's steeped in social progressivism, in the values of tolerance and diversity," Scheiber wrote. "The picture of the boardroom liberal is a corporate CEO handing a refrigerator-sized check to the head of a charity at a celebrity golf tournament. All the better if they're surrounded by minority children and struggling moms."

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