Tied to the Moneyed Interests

Matt Bai writes in the NYT on Sunday what a lot of people like myself have been thinking for sometime.

There was something discordant, even tinny, about Barack Obama’s attempt to castigate Wall Street last month. No doubt the president was trying to acknowledge and channel the resentments in his own party — and in the country — when he told CBS’s Steve Kroft during a “60 Minutes” interview, “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street.” Yet the rhetorical slap felt a little flat. In part it was the oddity of the epithet, a musty Washington cliché that had the effect of making Obama, the most urbane president in a half-century, sound as if he belonged in some black-and-white talkie from the ’40s. Why, listen here: I oughtta pound you — and all your fat-cat pals!
But it was also Obama’s body language, the dutiful way in which he delivered the line and elaborated on it, that gave the impression of a dapper man trying on an ill-fitting suit. When the president sat down for an amiable conversation with a group of those very same fat cats the next day, it only reinforced the impression among disenchanted Democrats that Obama shows more deference to moneyed interests than he does to liberals.

Go to any Democratic enclave in Washington these days, and you will hear the same complaint: Obama isn’t a real progressive, and not only because his economic team, culled mostly from Wall Street, boasts an elite pedigree. Union leaders are incensed over the administration’s ambivalence toward a bill that would make it easier to organize workers. Black lawmakers accuse Obama of doing little to stem unemployment among the poor. Liberals in Congress are appalled that the president has jettisoned the “public option” he once championed for his health care plan, which has only temporarily distracted them from their fury over the military buildup in Afghanistan. The left is on the verge of full revolt.

Then Bai goes on to make a peculiar case for Obama, saying that while he's not a populist like William Jennings Bryan or Huey Long (duh!), he is acting like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt in his thorough-going reformist actions.

If today’s liberals are serious about calling themselves progressives, then they may yet have to give up on the ideal of a president who enthusiastically excoriates fat cats — settling instead for a leader who is serious and methodical about reforming their ways.

The only problem with this argument is that Obama isn't acting like a Rooseveltian reformer at all, really. At least not that I can see. Bailing out the banks with no real quid pro quo, giving the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies pretty much all they wanted, ramping up the war in Afghanistan, continuing the secretive national security ways of the Bush administration, slapping down progressives when they speak up--where is the reformer in this?