A great example of Melissa Bean's power was when the banks wanted to pass an amendment into the bill that would have prevented the states from making their own tougher financial regulatory rules. She obligingly put through this amendment that basically said that the federal government would have purview over all these laws, not the states.
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In order to fix this country's economic and financial problems, President Obama is going to have to go over the heads of the special interests, to the people. There's a lot of sullen apprehension, frustration in the country now, and people are hungry for the kind of strong leadership that he is not currently providing. It would absolutely be a political winner for the president to hit Wall Street very hard and do all the things that FDR did. If he did that, if he remade Wall Street in the way that it needs to be remade, he would do nothing but gain popularity.
But what if by nature, that's not what he wants to do? What if, by nature, he prefers to head the establishment, rather than change it?
In that case he runs the risk of being a failed president. Let's just hope that he's a smart enough, principled enough guy, that some time in his second year in office, he's going to realize that he's at a crossroads.
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Is there a way that we can have a politician get elected without the sponsorship of corporate/Wall Street interests? Can we get somebody in the White House who's independent of these interests that are always in the way of real reform?
It's not accidental that the last three Democratic presidents have been at best, corporate Democrats. One hoped that because of the depth of our current crisis and the disgrace of deregulation and its ideology, and the practical failure of the Bush presidency, that this was a moment for a clean break. The fact that even at such a moment, even with an outsider president campaigning on "change we can believe in," Barack Obama turned out to be who he has been so far, is quite revealing in terms of the structural undertow that big money represents in this country. The question is: Is he capable of making a change in time to redeem the moment, redeem his own promise?
Back in the in the mid-'80s, after Walter Mondale lost, the Democrats made a conscious decision that they were no longer going to rely entirely on certain interest groups and unions to fund their campaigns. Instead they decided that they were going to try to close that funding gap with the Republicans. And they made a lot of concessions to the financial services industry and to big corporations generally. And that's who they are now. There are probably only 40 Democrats in the Senate who are not corporate Democrats. And there are probably only 200 Democrats in the House who are not corporate Democrats.
You have Republican wall-to-wall obstructionism, and with a few exceptions, Republicans are totally in bed with big business. And you have just enough Democrats who are in bed with big business that it makes it much harder for progressive Democrats to follow the agenda that the country so desperately needs.
It takes a lot of guts to confront the elite that really does have a hammerlock on politics in this country, and articulate the needs of ordinary people.
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