“Consider Barack Obama”

“It’s the corruption, stupid”: Hillary’s too compromised to see what Donald Trump understands
by Bill Curry, Salon
Tuesday, Feb 23, 2016 06:00 AM EST

(C)onsider Barack Obama. In 2008, America was almost as angry at its government as it is today. Then as now, the media and political consultants to both parties were blind to the issue. But Obama and strategist David Axelrod sort of got it. Axelrod wasn’t much for specificity. He preached the “politics of biography” (sell the person, not the policy). So Obama spoke of transforming “Washington’s culture.” It was powerful stuff, but not quite powerful enough.

Voters knew the problem wasn’t “partisan gridlock” but a hammerlock of special interests. They could abide politicians’ incivility but not their corruption. Obama added some policy meat to the metaphorical bone of his message. He called whistle-blowers heroes and vowed to strengthen freedom of information, to let C-SPAN cameras film healthcare negotiations, end no-bid contracts, close revolving doors and never hire lobbyists to handle matters of special concern to their ex-clients. By late fall, nearly every speech he gave ended in a rousing call for reform.

Breaking those vows was the original sin of the Obama administration. No C-SPAN cameras ever filmed a meeting. He didn’t treat whistle-blowers as heroes; he broke records prosecuting them. He didn’t end no-bid contracts; he increased them. He didn’t ban lobbyists; he recruited them. (Healthcare industry consultants drove that team; he even hired a defense lobbyist to oversee Pentagon procurement policy.) Revolving doors kept swinging; every ex-Obama staffer you ever heard of now sits on some comfy corporate perch. Republicans didn’t kill the reforms. Obama had the power to implement each one by executive order, but chose not to.

In 2008, Obama raised more money from big business than any candidate in either party’s history and in 2009 he hired the most conservative economic team of any Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. He then sided with insurers against a public option, with banks against rescuing homeowners and with business against raising the minimum wage. If you’re highly educated and care more about cultural than economic issues, you may not have noticed. If you’re financially pressed, you may be torn between Sanders and Trump, or have given up on politics altogether.

Clinton calls it an “artful smear” to suggest that she, Obama or any Democrat is influenced by the money they say corrupts every Republican. Her anger is partly a pose. But any card-carrying member of the establishment will take any suggestion that the system is compromised as a personal insult. This is true of elite reporters as well as politicians.
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Clinton knows she can’t convince a trade unionist or a single mother that her neoliberal world order is better for them than Bernie’s revolution so she avoids side by side policy comparisons and paints him as the “other.” In Nevada it worked. She accused him of being disloyal; he cited the times he was loyal or spoke loftily of his right to dissent. He might have said loyalty to principle meant as much to him as party loyalty did to her, that he loves Obama too but that it’s time to give all people decent healthcare and a living wage; to break up the big banks and clean up the corrupt politics they feed on. He didn’t say it. He needs to say it soon.

The soft corruption of establishment politics is what we mean when we say the system’s rigged. It is Sanders’ great advantage; on the overarching issue of the election he alone among all the candidates wants what we want: an end to politics as we know it. The best place for him to start is with Obama’s 2008 reform agenda; an end to back rooms revolving doors and no-bid contracts, to hiring lobbyists and persecuting whistle-blowers. No one could question the agenda’s popularity or his ability, once in office, to deliver it. He wouldn’t need a new Court or Congress. He could just order it done. Nor could anyone question his loyalty, at least not out loud. He’d be keeping the biggest promise Obama ever made.