salon | Is there anybody who thinks he’s progressive enough today?
Nobody
I know. Not even among the progressive liberals. Nobody I know. Part of
this, as you can imagine, is that early on there was a strong
private-public distinction. People would come to me and say privately,
“We see what you’re saying. We think you’re too harsh in how you say it
but we agree very much with what you’re saying in private.” In public,
no comment. Now, more and more of it spills over in public.
There’s
a lot of disillusionment now. My liberal friends included. The phrase
that I have heard from more than one person in the last year is they
feel like they got played.
That’s true. That’s exactly
right. What I hear is that, “He pimped us.” I heard that a zillion
times. “He pimped us, brother West.” That’s another way of saying “we
got played.”
You remember that enthusiasm in 2008. I’m from Kansas City. He came and spoke in Kansas City and 75,000 people came to see him.
Oh
yeah. Well we know there were moments in Portland, Oregon, there were
moments in Seattle. He had the country in the palm of his hand in terms
of progressive possibilities.
What on earth ails the man? Why can’t he fight the Republicans? Why does he need to seek a grand bargain?
I
think Obama, his modus operandi going all the way back to when he was
head of the [Harvard] Law Review, first editor of the Law Review and
didn’t have a piece in the Law Review. He was chosen because he always
occupied the middle ground. He doesn’t realize that a great leader, a
statesperson, doesn’t just occupy middle ground. They occupy higher
ground or the moral ground or even sometimes the holy ground. But the
middle ground is not the place to go if you’re going to show courage and
vision. And I think that’s his modus operandi. He always moves to the
middle ground. It turned out that historically, this was not a moment
for a middle-ground politician. We needed a high-ground statesperson and
it’s clear now he’s not the one.
And so what did he do? Every
time you’re headed toward middle ground what do you do? You go straight
to the establishment and reassure them that you’re not too radical, and
try to convince them that you are very much one of them so you end up
with a John Brennan, architect of torture [as CIA Director]. Torturers
go free but they’re real patriots so we can let them go free. The rule
of law doesn’t mean anything.
The rule of law, oh my God. There’s one law for us and another law if you work on Wall Street.
That’s
exactly right. Even with [Attorney General] Eric Holder. Eric Holder
won’t touch the Wall Street executives; they’re his friends. He might
charge them some money. They want to celebrate. This money is just a tax
write-off for these people. There’s no accountability. No
answerability. No responsibility that these people have to take at all.
The same is true with the Robert Rubin crowd. Obama comes in, he’s got
all this populist rhetoric which is wonderful, progressive populist
rhetoric which we needed badly. What does he do, goes straight to the
Robert Rubin crowd and here comes Larry Summers, here comes Tim
Geithner, we can go on and on and on, and he allows them to run things.
You see it in the Suskind book, The Confidence Men. These guys
are running things, and these are neoliberal, deregulating free
marketeers—and poverty is not even an afterthought for them.
