Tag Archives: frank

Yeah, Democrats Are Pretty Pro-Corporate Too

by DannielleLay Posted on December 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago I poured cold water on the idea that tea partiers might join up with the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party to form some kind of populist anti-corporate coalition. “Every once in a while they’ll get themselves exercised over some trivial issue of ‘crony capitalism’ like reauthorizing the Export-Import bank,” I said, but the truth is that the tea partiers have no real devotion to anti-corporatism. They just want to cut taxes and slash welfare.

Over at National Review, Veronique de Rugy tries to make the case that ExIm is more important than I’m giving it credit for, but I’m not buying it. Sorry. It’s just a shiny object of the moment that’s both small and costs virtually nothing. On the other hand, I’m entirely willing to buy de Rugy’s suggestion that Democrats aren’t especially anti-corporate either:

Please. They talk the talk, but when it’s time to vote, they rarely walk the walk. In the end, not unlike a number of Republicans, Democrats rarely miss an opportunity to support big businesses. They support the Department of Energy’s 1705 loans, which mostly go to wealthy energy companies, and they never fail to join Republicans in saving other corporate energy subsidies; they support the reauthorization of OPIC, which mostly benefits large corporations; they support farm subsidies, which mostly benefit large agro-businesses at the expenses of small farms; they support Obamacare, which among other things amounts to a huge giveaway to the insurance industry; they support auto and bank bailouts; and for all their complaints about Wall Street, they managed to write a law, Dodd-Frank, that in some ways protects the big financial institutions that they claim to despise.

I’d quibble with some of this. Obamacare is indeed good for the insurance industry, but it’s not that good. And anyway, this is mostly due to the fact that the structure of American health care is historically dependent on private insurance, and it’s just not possible to completely overhaul that overnight. In this case, Democrats caved in to special interests as much because they had to as because they wanted to.

Still, it’s true that most Democrats are pretty cozy with corporate America. There’s a smallish anti-corporate wing of the party, but it rarely has much influence because (a) it’s usually outnumbered in the Democratic caucus and (b) there’s essentially no anti-corporate wing of the Republican Party to team up with. Being pro-corporate is one of the few bipartisan issues left in Congress. There are lots of fights over small stuff, but it’s mostly just window dressing that hides widespread agreement over the big stuff.

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Yeah, Democrats Are Pretty Pro-Corporate Too

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Here’s What Democrats Got Out of the Cromnibus

by TNJNoellaswhkn Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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The worst part of the “cromnibus” spending bill was the provision that guts a small piece of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and allows banks to get back into the custom swaps business. So why did Democratic negotiators agree to this? In a long tick-tock published yesterday, Politico tells us:

During [] negotiations with House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), his Senate counterpart, agreed to keep the provision in exchange for more funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to aides.

OK. Democrats have been ambivalent about this particular provision of Dodd-Frank from the start, and therefore they were willing to cut a deal that allowed Republicans to repeal it. But what about the rest of the spending bill? Republicans got a bunch of venal little favors inserted, but what did Democrats get? Here’s retiring Rep. Jim Moran:

In 20 years of being on the appropriations bill, I haven’t seen a better compromise in terms of Democratic priorities. Implementing the Affordable Care Act, there’s a lot more money for early-childhood development — the only priority that got cut was the EPA but we gave them more money than the administration asked for….There were 26 riders that were extreme and would have devastated the Environmental Protection Agency in terms of the Clean Water and Clean Air Act administration; all of those were dropped. There were only two that were kept and they wouldn’t have been implemented this fiscal year. So, we got virtually everything that the Democrats tried to get.

And here is President Obama:

The Administration appreciates the bipartisan effort to include full-year appropriations legislation for most Government functions that allows for planning and provides certainty, while making progress toward appropriately investing in economic growth and opportunity, and adequately funding national security requirements. The Administration also appreciates the authorities and funding provided to enhance the U.S. Government’s response to the Ebola epidemic, and to implement the Administration’s strategy to counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, as well as investments for the President’s early education agenda, Pell Grants, the bipartisan Manufacturing Institutes initiative, and extension of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program.

What’s the point of posting this laundry list? Curiosity. Last night a reader sent a tweet to me: “Honest question: what do progressives get out of this? ‘Govt not shutting down’ not enough.” I was stumped. I really had no idea whether Democrats had gotten anything in this bill, or if they were just caving in to a whole bunch of obnoxious Republican demands merely in exchange for keeping the government funded.

But as it turns out, Democrats did get a bunch of stuff they wanted. And of course, that’s in addition to getting the government funded before Republicans take over Congress in January, which is worthwhile all by itself. We can each decide for ourselves whether Democrats got enough, or if they should have held out for a better deal, but they weren’t left empty-handed.

So what I’m curious about is this: why are virtually no Democrats talking about this? As near as I can tell, there was literally no attempt to sell this compromise to the base, or to anyone else. As a result, the general feeling among progressives is simple: this bill was an unqualified cave-in from gutless Democrats who, once again, refused to fight back against Republican hostage taking. And as usual, Republicans won.

I understand that trying to defend a messy, backroom bill that trades some dull but responsible victories for a bunch of horrible little giveaways isn’t very appealing to anyone. And who knows? Maybe Democrats were afraid that if they crowed too much about the concessions they’d won it would just provoke the tea party wing of the Republican party and scuttle the bill. The tea partiers were already plenty pissed off about the cromnibus, after all.

Still, shouldn’t someone have been in charge of quietly making the progressive case for this bill? It wouldn’t have convinced everyone, but it might have reduced the grumbling within the base a little bit. Why was that not worth doing?

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Here’s What Democrats Got Out of the Cromnibus

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Friday Cat Blogging – 14 November 2014

by Judith8el Posted on November 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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As you may recall, last week I regaled you with the news that cats (allegedly) love circles. Put a circular object on the floor, and they’ll flock to it. But is this true? On Saturday, my sister visited and we performed our experiment: she laid down a scarf on the floor in a circular shape and we waited. I insisted that we do nothing to influence the cats, since that would ruin all the lovely Science™, but we didn’t have to wait long. Hilbert came over first, and then Hopper followed. For the next 15 minutes they went nuts for the circle. By the time I took the picture on the right, the scarf was no longer all that circular, but it didn’t matter. They loved it.

So there you have it. Cats do love circles. The reason, however, remains a mystery, so let’s move on to this week’s official catblogging. I’ve already mentioned that I have a hard time keeping up with our little furballs unless they’re snoozing, so this week you get a picture of them snoozing (Hopper on the left, Hilbert on the right). I sent this to the shelter where we got them, and they thought it was hilarious. Our guys are not the kind of cats who curl up when they sleep. They stretch out as far as they can to air out their tummies, even if that means they’re often hanging over the edge of a chair. But the couch is better. Even they can only fill up half a couch.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 14 November 2014

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Elizabeth Warren Gets a Promotion — Or Does She?

by HopeBungaree Posted on November 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Elizabeth Warren is getting a promotion:

Seeking ideological and regional balance, a chastened Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) expanded his leadership team Thursday, including the addition of liberal icon Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), to beat back internal critics…..Expanding the leadership table — Warren’s position was created specifically for her — is a way to answer the critics who think that Reid’s team became insulated in recent years, according to senior Democratic aides.

I’m curious: Am I the only person who thinks this is probably not a great move for Warren? She’s now officially part of the Democratic leadership, which makes her implicitly responsible for party policy and implicitly loyal to the existing leadership. And what is she getting in return? Unless I’m missing something, a made-up leadership position with no actual authority.

Is this a good trade? I’m not so sure.

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Elizabeth Warren Gets a Promotion — Or Does She?

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Can We Talk? Here’s Why the White Working Class Hates Democrats

by JonahYIIko Posted on November 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Noam Scheiber takes on one of the lessons du jour that always crop up after a party gets shellacked at the polls: how do we appeal to demographic group X that voted so heavily against us? In this case, the party is the Democrats, and the demographic group is the infamous white working class, which voted Republican by a 30-point margin last week:

At first blush, the white working class would appear to pose a real dilemma. The set of issues on which the Democratic Party is most coherent these days is social progressivism….But while these issues unite college-educated voters and working-class minority voters, they’ve historically alienated the white working class.

….How to square this circle? Well, it turns out we don’t really have to, since the analysis is outdated. The white working class is increasingly open to social liberalism, or at least not put off by it. As Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin observed this summer, 54 percent of the white working class born after 1980 think gays and lesbians should have the right to marry, according to data assembled from the 2012 election.

….Long story short, there’s a coalition available to Democrats that knits together working class minorities and college-educated voters and slices heavily into the GOP’s margins among the white working class….The basis of the coalition isn’t a retreat from social progressivism, but making economic populism the party’s centerpiece….The politics of this approach work not just because populism is a “message” that a majority of voters want to hear. But because, unlike the status quo, it can actually improve their economic prospects, as Harold Meyerson recently pointed out.

I’d like to offer a different interpretation. I don’t have a bunch of poll data readily at hand to back this up, so it’s possible I’m way off base. But I don’t think so, and at the very least I welcome pushback since it might clarify some things that need clarifying.

Here it is: I agree that social liberalism isn’t quite the deal killer it used to be. Scheiber and Teixera are right about that. It’s still an issue—especially gun control, which remains more potent than a lot of liberals like to acknowledge—but it’s fading somewhat in areas like abortion and gay marriage. There are still plenty of Fox-watching members of the WWC who are as socially conservative as ever, but I think it’s safe to say that at the margins social issues are becoming a little less divisive among the WWC than they have been over the past few decades.

But if that’s the case, why does the WWC continue to loathe Democrats so badly? I think the answer is as old as the discussion itself: They hate welfare. There was a hope among some Democrats that Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform would remove this millstone from around Democrats’ necks, and for a few years during the dotcom boom it probably did. The combination of tougher work rules and a booming economy made it a less contentious topic.

But when the economy stagnates and life gets harder, people get meaner. That’s just human nature. And the economy has been stagnating for the working class for well over a decade—and then practically collapsing ever since 2008.

So who does the WWC take out its anger on? Largely, the answer is the poor. In particular, the undeserving poor. Liberals may hate this distinction, but it doesn’t matter if we hate it. Lots of ordinary people make this distinction as a matter of simple common sense, and the WWC makes it more than any. That’s because they’re closer to it. For them, the poor aren’t merely a set of statistics or a cause to be championed. They’re the folks next door who don’t do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars. For a lot of members of the WWC, this is personal in a way it just isn’t for the kind of people who read this blog.

And who is it that’s responsible for this infuriating flow of government money to the shiftless? Democrats. We fight to save food stamps. We fight for WIC. We fight for Medicaid expansion. We fight for Obamacare. We fight to move poor families into nearby housing.

This is a big problem because these are all things that benefit the poor but barely touch the working class. Does it matter that the working class barely pays for most of these programs in the first place, since their federal income taxes tend to be pretty low? Nope. They’re still paying taxes, and it seems like they never get anything for it. It’s always someone else.

It’s pointless to argue that this perception is wrong. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. But it’s there. And although it’s bound up with plenty of other grievances—many of them frankly racial, but also cultural, religious, and geographic1—at its core you have a group of people who are struggling and need help, but instead feel like they simply get taxed and taxed for the benefit of someone else. Always someone else. If this were you, you wouldn’t vote for Democrats either.

I hate to end this with the usual cliche that I don’t know what to do about it, but I don’t. Helping the poor is one of the great causes of liberalism, and we forfeit our souls if we give up on it. And yet, as a whole bunch of people have acknowledged lately, the Democratic Party simply doesn’t do much for either the working or middle classes these days. Republicans, by contrast, offer both the concrete—tax cuts—and the emotional—an inchoate but still intense rage against a government that seems not to care about them.

So sure: full-throated economic populism? That might work, though everyone seems to have a different idea of what it means. But here’s one thing it better mean: policies that are aimed at the working and middle classes and that actually appeal to them. That is, policies that are simple, concrete, and offer benefits which are clear and compelling.

This is going to require policy wonks to swallow hard. Remember Cash 4 Clunkers? Economically, that was probably a dumb program that accomplished little. But it didn’t do any harm, and people sure loved it. Multiply that by a hundred and you’re on the right track.

1The Democrats’ problem with the white working class is far worse in the South than anywhere else. Nonetheless, I think we’re kidding ourselves if we crunch a bunch of numbers and somehow conclude that it’s not a problem elsewhere. It’s not as big a problem, but in an electorate that continues to be balanced on a tightrope, five or ten percentage points among a sizeable group of people is still a pretty big problem.

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Can We Talk? Here’s Why the White Working Class Hates Democrats

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Obama Takes a Good Half Step Toward an Unequivocal Ban on Torture

by GloryGibbbrq Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s worth mentioning that the Obama administration has finally decided to take a more expansive view of where torture and “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” is banned:

The Obama administration, after an internal debate that has drawn global scrutiny, is taking the view that the cruelty ban applies wherever the United States exercises governmental authority, according to officials familiar with the deliberations. That definition, they said, includes the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and American-flagged ships and aircraft in international waters and airspace.

But the administration’s definition still appears to exclude places like the former “black site” prisons where the C.I.A. tortured terrorism suspects during the Bush years, as well as American military detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars there. Those prisons were on the sovereign territory of other governments; the government of Cuba exercises no control over Guantánamo.

Why exclude black sites? Administration officials apparently say this is just a “technical matter of interpretation, underlined by concerns that changing the jurisdictional scope could have unintended consequences, like increasing the risk of lawsuits by overseas detainees or making it harder to say that unrelated treaties with similar jurisdictional language did not apply in the same places.”

I can….almost buy that. Lawyers and diplomats get pretty hung up on stuff like this. Nonetheless, I’d be a lot happier if Obama could be a little more Bush-like here, and simply overrule the legal eagles and insist on a clear and unequivocal policy. It’s hard to believe there isn’t a way to do that which wouldn’t somehow wreck a bunch of other treaties at the same time.

So two cheers for doing the right thing. But not three.

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Obama Takes a Good Half Step Toward an Unequivocal Ban on Torture

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Was Obama Naive?

by EstebanHarpster Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman has finally come around to a fair assessment of Barack Obama’s term in office: not perfect, by any means, and he probably could have accomplished more with better tactics and a better understanding of his opponents. Still and all, he accomplished a lot. By any reasonable standard, he’s been a pretty successful liberal president.

Ezra Klein says this is because he abandoned one of the key goals of his presidency:

From 2009 to 2010, Obama, while seeking the post-partisan presidency he wanted, established the brutally partisan presidency he got. Virtually every achievement Krugman recounts — the health-care law, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, the financial rescue, the stimulus bill — passed in these first two years when Democrats held huge majorities in congress. And every item on the list passed over screaming Republican opposition.

….Obama spent his first two years keeping many of his policy promises by sacrificing his central political promise. That wasn’t how it felt to the administration at the time. They thought that success would build momentum; that change would beget change. Obama talked of the “muscle memory” congress would rediscover as it passed big bills; he hoped that achievements would replenish his political capital rather than drain it.

In this, the Obama administration was wrong, and perhaps naive.

This is, to me, one of the most interesting questions about the Obama presidency: was he ever serious about building a bipartisan consensus? Did he really think he could pass liberal legislation with some level of Republican cooperation? Or was this little more than routine campaign trail bushwa?

To some extent, I think it was just the usual chicken-in-every-pot hyperbole of American presidential campaigns. American elites venerate bipartisanship, and it’s become pretty routine to assure everyone that once you’re in office you’ll change the toxic culture of Washington DC. Bush Jr. promised it. Clinton promised it. Bush Sr. promised it. Carter promised it. Even Nixon promised it.

(Reagan is the exception. Perhaps that’s why he’s still so revered by conservatives despite the fact that his actual conduct in office was considerably more pragmatic than his rhetoric.)

So when candidates say this, do they really believe it? Or does it belong in the same category as promises that you’ll restore American greatness and supercharge the economy for the middle class? In Obama’s case, it sure sounded like more than pro forma campaign blather. So maybe he really did believe it. Hell, maybe all the rest of them believed it too. The big difference this time around was the opposition. Every other president has gotten at least some level of cooperation from the opposition party. Maybe not much, but some. Obama got none. This was pretty unprecedented in recent history, and it’s hard to say that he should have been able to predict this back in 2008. He probably figured that he’d get at least a little bit of a honeymoon, especially given the disastrous state of the economy, but he didn’t. From Day 1 he got nothing except an adamantine wall of obstruction.

Clearly, then, Obama was wrong about the prospects for bipartisanship. But was he naive? I’d say he’s guilty of a bit of that, but the truth is that he really did end up facing a hornet’s nest of unprecedented proportions. This might have taken any new president by surprise.

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Was Obama Naive?

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A GOP Senate’s First Target: Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Protection Agency

by KathleenEdmundl Posted on September 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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If the GOP wins the Senate, they’ll no doubt use the opportunity to push through a range of measures that are kryptonite to Democratic voters—new abortion restrictions, limits on the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to combat climate change, a relaxation of the rules reining in Wall Street’s worst excesses.

But Republicans are particularly keen on handicapping one particular federal watchdog: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the three-year-old agency that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) devised and helped build in the wake of the financial crisis.

The bureau’s job is to make sure Americans aren’t getting screwed by mortgage lenders, credit card companies, debt collectors, and other financial institutions. It’s the first federal agency designed specifically to protect everyday consumers from financial wrongdoing, and Republicans have done everything in their power to hobble the agency—including fighting the confirmation of its director, Richard Cordray. Winning the Senate in November could be their best chance to roll back Warren’s greatest accomplishment.

Half of their work is already done. The House has passed a bill that would limit the bureau’s power by replacing its director with a five-member panel, and subjecting its budget to the congressional appropriations process—meaning that hostile lawmakers could starve it to death. (Unlike most federal agencies, the bureau is bankrolled by the Federal Reserve, an effort to free it from the whims of partisan politics.) House Republicans have also introduced legislation to let other financial regulators overturn CFPB rules, to eliminate a fund the bureau uses to compensate consumers who’ve been defrauded by an institution that’s gone belly-up, and to restrict the kind of data the bureau may collect from consumers. (Republicans have charged that the CFPB’s collection of credit data is a violation of privacy, even though the bureau does not collect any personal details the consumer doesn’t volunteer.)

The Democratic-controlled Senate has refused to consider these types of bills from the House, but the floodgates would open with a GOP takeover. “You just have to watch the House to see what is going to come out of the Senate,” says a Senate Democratic staffer who works on banking issues.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who is expected to chair the banking committee if his party takes the Senate, has led the charge to water down the CFPB’s powers. Financial-reform advocates say he would likely speed the House bills through committee.

President Obama, of course, has his veto power—Senate Dems could block legislation so long as Republicans lack a filibuster-proof majority. But Obama and his party might cave, Hill staffers say, if anti-CFPB legislation were attached to a bill they really had to pass, such as an appropriations bill or a debt ceiling measure.

A Republican-controlled Senate would also likely try to eviscerate portions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act. In 2011, Shelby introduced a bill to beef up the requirements that force banking regulators to conduct cost-benefit analyses prior to issuing any new rule—a significant hurdle. Last year, the House passed a handful of bills to deregulate derivatives, often-opaque banking products that have been demonized as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” In June, House Republicans passed a bill chipping away at consumer mortgage protections.

The financial industry and Republicans are likely to sell these Dodd-Frank rollbacks as “small technical” fixes, a former Treasury Department official told me, and “the White House is more likely to cave” and sign them into law if “they don’t have help from a Democratic Senate in blocking and tackling.”

A GOP Senate would scale back financial regulations “in so many ways,” the Democratic Senate staffer says, “I don’t know where to start.”

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A GOP Senate’s First Target: Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Protection Agency

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"Bull City Summer": Incredible Photos From a Year Embedded With a Minor League Club

by GudrunNesmith Posted on August 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Twenty-five years after Bull Durham introduced the world to the minor league world of Crash Davis, Annie Savoy, and Nuke LaLoosh, a group of writers and photographers descended on Durham, North Carolina, to document life with the hometown team. The result is Bull City Summer: A Season at the Ballpark, a rich photo book interspersed with smart, poignant essays about the game’s rhythm, its injustice, and its occasional grace.

The essayists introduce us to a familiar cast of characters: the elderly couple who’ve missed just 50 games in 30-plus years; the aging veteran playing out the string in Triple-A, four years removed from a World Series appearance with the Yankees; the Duke philosophy professor who, before succumbing to colon cancer in 2013, would “adopt” a player every year, bringing him cookies and the occasional CD filled with classical music; the Cuban first baseman whose league MVP award will get him no closer to the big leagues; the general manager who helped revitalize the club in 1980 and who claims at the start of one essay, “I’m a gifted salesman. I hate it, but I am.”

Meanwhile, the photos highlight the play between the sort of regional authenticity that clubs sell to local fans and the generic ballpark experience found in dozens of baseball towns—Corpus Christi, Rancho Cucamonga, New Britain, wherever—around the country. There are still lifes; there are landscapes; there are stadium workers and players and fans in varying arrangements and formats, including the occasional tintype.

Running throughout Bull City Summer, though, is that old sense of the minor leagues as something special, something sui generis. “The majors are baseball’s height, but the minors are its depth,” writes Adam Sobsey, “and what we have here may be richer.”

All photos from Bull City Summer: A Season at the Ballpark, Daylight Books. Conceived and edited by Sam Stephenson. Photographs by Alec Soth, Hiroshi Watanabe, Hank Willis Thomas, Alex Harris, Frank Hunter, Kate Joyce, Elizabeth Matheson, Leah Sobsey. Essays by Michael Croley, Howard L. Craft, David Henry, Emma D. Miller, Adam Sobsey and Ivan Weiss.

Center Field #2, 2013 Alec Soth

Holly, 2013 Alec Soth

Outside the Ballpark #2, Durham, North Carolina, June 2013 Alex Harris

Light in a Summer Night #7, 2013 Frank Hunter

Approaching storm, Goodman field Frank Hunter

Vendor Frank Hunter

In collaboration with Colby Katz, Allen Mullin, Ben Berry, Emma Miller, Ivan Weiss, Michael Itkoff, Mika Chance, Matali Routh, Ryan Vin, and Sara Schultz: A Futile Attempt to Take a Portrait of Everyone who Attended the Latest Regular Season Game, 2013 Hank Willis Thomas

Pitching practice (Team psychologist), April 2013 Kate Joyce

Craig Albernaz’s Catcher’s Mask, 2013 Hiroshi Watanabe

Untitled, 2013 Elizabeth Matheson

Daylight Books, 2014

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"Bull City Summer": Incredible Photos From a Year Embedded With a Minor League Club

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If the Left Wants Scapegoats, Just Look in the Mirror

by MeriditNewcomb Posted on July 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Thomas Frank is convinced that Barack Obama single-handedly prevented America from becoming the lefty paradise it was on course for after the financial meltdown of 2008:

The Obama team, as the president once announced to a delegation of investment bankers, was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” and in retrospect these words seem not only to have been a correct assessment of the situation at the moment but a credo for his entire term in office. For my money, they should be carved in stone over the entrance to his monument: Barack Obama as the one-man rescue squad for an economic order that had aroused the fury of the world. Better: Obama as the awesomely talented doctor who kept the corpse of a dead philosophy lumbering along despite it all.

….In point of fact, there were plenty of things Obama’s Democrats could have done that might have put the right out of business once and for all—for example, by responding more aggressively to the Great Recession or by pounding relentlessly on the theme of middle-class economic distress. Acknowledging this possibility, however, has always been difficult for consensus-minded Democrats, and I suspect that in the official recounting of the Obama era, this troublesome possibility will disappear entirely. Instead, the terrifying Right-Wing Other will be cast in bronze at twice life-size, and made the excuse for the Administration’s every last failure of nerve, imagination and foresight. Demonizing the right will also allow the Obama legacy team to present his two electoral victories as ends in themselves, since they kept the White House out of the monster’s grasp—heroic triumphs that were truly worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. (Which will be dusted off and prominently displayed.)

I see this kind of thing all the time on the right. If only we had a candidate who refused to sell out conservative values! A candidate who could truly make the American public understand! Then we’d win in a landslide!

It’s easy to recognize this as delusional. Tea party types are always convinced that America is thirsting for true conservatism, and all that’s needed is a latter-day Ronald Reagan to be its salesman. Needless to say, this misses the point that Americans aren’t all reactionaries. In fact, as the embarrassing clown shows of the past two GOP primaries have shown, even most Republicans aren’t reactionaries. There’s been no shortage of honest-to-God right wingers to choose from, but they can’t even win the nomination, let alone a general election.

(Of course you never know. Maybe 2016 is the year!)

But if it’s so easy to see this conservative delusion for what it is, why isn’t it equally easy to recognize the same brand of liberal delusion? Back in 2009, was Obama really the only thing that stood between bankers and the howling mob? Don’t be silly. Americans were barely even upset, let alone ready for revolution. Those pathetic demonstrations outside the headquarters of AIG were about a hundredth the size that even a half-ass political organization can muster for a routine anti-abortion rally. After a few days the AIG protestors got bored and went home without so much as throwing a few bottles at cops. Even the Greeks managed that much.

Why were Americans so obviously not enraged? Because—duh—the hated neoliberal system worked. We didn’t have a second Great Depression. The Fed intervened, the banking system was saved, and a stimulus bill was passed. Did bankers get treated too well? Oh yes indeed. Was the stimulus too small? You bet. Nevertheless, was America saved from an epic collapse? It sure was. Instead of a massive meltdown, we got a really bad recession and a weak recovery, and even that was cushioned by a safety net that, although inadequate, was more than enough to keep the pitchforks off the streets.

As for Obama, could he have done more? I suppose he probably could have, but it’s a close call. Even with his earnest efforts at bipartisanship at the beginning of his presidency, he only barely passed any stimulus at all. If instead he’d issued thundering populist manifestos, even Susan Collins would have turned against him and the stimulus bill would have been not too small, but completely dead. Ditto for virtually everything else Obama managed to pass by one or two votes during his first 18 months. If that had happened, the economy would have done even worse, and if you somehow think this means the public would have become more sympathetic to the party in the White House, then your knowledge of American politics is at about the kindergarten level. Democrats would have lost even more seats in 2010 than they did.

Look: Obama made some mistakes. He should have done more about housing. He shouldn’t have pivoted to deficit-mongering so quickly. Maybe he could have kept a public option in Obamacare if he’d fought harder for it. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But probably not. Like it or not, America was not poised for a huge liberal wave in 2008. It just wasn’t. It was poised for a fairly routine cycle of throwing out the old bums and electing new bums, who would, as usual, be given a very short and very limited honeymoon. Democrats actually accomplished a fair amount during that honeymoon, but no, they didn’t turn American into a lefty paradise. That was never in the cards.

All of us who do what Thomas Frank does—what I do—have failed. Our goal was to persuade the public to move in a liberal direction, and that didn’t happen. In the end, we didn’t persuade much of anyone. It’s natural to want to avoid facing that humiliating truth, and equally natural to look for someone else to blame instead. That’s human nature. So fine. Blame Obama if it makes you feel better. That’s what we elect presidents for: to take the blame.

But he only deserves his share. The rest of us, who were unable to take advantage of an epic financial collapse to get the public firmly in favor of pitchforks and universal health care, deserve most of it. The mirror doesn’t lie.

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If the Left Wants Scapegoats, Just Look in the Mirror

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