Obama’s Opportunity

For another take on the whole “socialist” thing, it’s useful to look at Rick Hertzberg’s take on Friday’s Krauthammer column:

If Barack Obama succeeds, his joint address to Congress will be seen as historic—indeed as the foundational document of Obamaism. As it stands, it constitutes the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.

Obama sees the current economic crisis as an opportunity. He has said so openly. And now we know what opportunity he wants to seize. Just as the Depression created the political and psychological conditions for Franklin Roosevelt’s transformation of America from laissez-faireism to the beginnings of the welfare state, the current crisis gives Obama the political space to move the still (relatively) modest American welfare state toward European-style social democracy.

Hertzberg remarks: “From your keyboard to God’s ear”

For a more fleshed-out positive take on this, read my former boss Bob Kuttner’s book Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. I’m actually not so certain that this “crisis = opportunity” perspective is correct. The opportunity rests in the election results. And the election results are clearly related, in part, to the collapse of the economy. But the opportunity would actually be much greater if the economic problems were much less severe than they actually are. The ideal scenario would have been a panic lasting a few months that turned out to have relatively little real bite. Otherwise, bad times both open the conceptual window and narrow the fiscal window with it being hard to say which will win out in the end.

I would also say that, contra Krauthammer, Obama has been pretty clear about his overall vision since at least the winter of 2007-2008. New investments in education and infrastructure, health care that’s affordable for all, and a move to a more sustainable carbon emissions regime have always been the agenda of all the major Democratic presidential contenders and so the odds of someone winning on platform like that have looked quite good for a long time now, back before most people believed there was any kind of crisis.