Hoover-Obama

Another short excerpt from the Kevin Baker piece in Harper's:

"Speeches almost as powerful have followed, always linking these ideas
together. But, like Hoover, Obama has been unable to make his actions
live up to his words. Health care is being gummed to death on Capitol
Hill. Obama has done nothing to pass “card check” provisions that
would facilitate union organization and quietly announced that he
would not seek stronger labor and environmental protections in
NAFTA. He has capitulated on cap-and-trade in the budget outline and
never even bothered to push for an actual carbon tax. Only minuscule
portions of the stimulus bill or his budget proposals were dedicated to
mass transit, and his indifference to the issue—what must be a major
component of any serious effort to go green—was reflected in his ap-
pointment of a mediocre Republican time-server, Ray LaHood, as his
transportation secretary.

Still worse is Obama’s decision to leave the reordering of the financial
world solely to Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, both of whom
played such a major role in deregulating Wall Street and bringing on the
disaster in the fi rst place. It’s as if, after winning election in 1932, FDR had
brought Andrew Mellon back to the Treasury. Just as Herbert Hoover
could not, in the end, break away from the best economic advice of the
1920s, Barack Obama is sticking with the “key men” of the 1990s."

Yeah, check older posts on this blog about Obama, unions and EFCA. He said to sold-out crowds that he would "stand up and fight for EFCA, rather than just waiting for it to arrive at his desk". This shouldn't really be surprising. But its still disappointing to think about how many people in the union movement mobilized to help get Obama elected, just to seem him prove what they should have realized would happen all along: He'd do what Democrats do best, and bow to Capital when push comes to shove.