If Only Obama Had Done the Things Obama Actually Did [View all]

[DemocratSinceBirth]

Matt Stoller, who has repeatedly dismissed the Obama administration as a failure, tells the New York Times that candidates who sound like Obama will face suspicion from voters. “We tried that and it didn’t work,” Stoller said. “And it’s pretty obvious to everybody now that it didn’t work.” By “everybody” he apparently means the 5 percent of Democrats who don’t approve of Obama.

It may well be the case that an influential progressive intellectual like Stoller, in observing his own milieu, believes more or less everybody in the Democratic party to consider Obama a failure. Barack Obama is a figure of near uniform approval among the Democratic voting base. Yet he is a subject of bitter contention among the progressive intelligentsia. The socialist left believes the Democratic party took a sharp right turn away from the New Deal in the 1970s, and has never returned. This premise, which is at best simplistic and at worst completely erroneous, is used to indict every Democratic president since that time for the identical charge of “neoliberal” betrayal of the party’s Rooseveltian creed.

A recent Washington Post op-ed by Lawrence Glickman helpfully illustrates what makes this accusation so maddening. Glickman charges all the post-Johnson Democratic presidents with a “surprising reluctance to celebrate Roosevelt or the New Deal.” This reluctance is supposedly in contrast with the enthusiastic pro-Roosevelt leanings of socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who of course represent the party’s return to the old, true faith.

It’s difficult to substantiate a charge like “reluctance to celebrate Roosevelt or the New Deal,” and Glickman doesn’t really try. But it’s worth pointing out that Obama has celebrated Roosevelt many times — including his 2008 convention speech (“We are the party of Roosevelt,”) the 2010 signing of his health care law, and his 2012 convention speech (“It will require common effort, shared responsibility, and the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one”). I’m not sure where Glickman gets the idea that Obama refused to draw on Roosevelt’s legacy, but it doesn’t seem to have any basis in reality.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/if-only-obama-had-done-the-things-obama-actually-did.html