Sorkin, who is much more sympathetic to predatory private power than anyone rational should be comfortable with (giving Hank Paulson the role of Superman during the financial crisis rather than Brainiac should give anyone pause), allowed Obama to make rather salient points about the recovery under his watch while simultaneously allowing him to go blind concerning corporate malfeasance (financial fraud and the subprime mess weren't even fucking mentioned), as well as bizarrely equating Bernie bros' anger with that of Trumpsters:
"“In some ways,” (Obama) said, “engaging in those hard changes that we need to make to create a more nimble, dynamic economy doesn’t yield immediate benefits and can seem like a distraction or an effort to undermine a bygone era that doesn’t exist. And that then feeds, both on the left and the right, a temptation to say, ‘If we could just go back to an era in which our borders were closed,’ or ‘If we could just go back to a time when everybody had a defined-benefit plan,’ or ‘We could just go back to a time when there wasn’t any immigrant that was taking my job, things would be O.K.’ ” He didn’t mention Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders by name, but the implications were obvious."Ye gods, I'm going to throw up.
I mean, it's not like Obama deserves zero credit for the recovery. But yikes. The president doesn't like being called names by Wall Street? I doubt he takes that seriously even as a PR problem, especially since he took pains to reassure them he'd be doing "business as usual" with them as early as March, 2009, months before any of the sound bytes quoted in this piece even burped into the mainstream.
Well, when it comes to Sorkin, one should expect such doublethink. I also saw the Wall Street Journal's response to this article coming as well (something like "Obama takes credit, but he shouldn't because the recovery is still worse than it was before his inauguration, and why it was so screwed up then, well, we just won't go there…"). All of this in a week where David Brooks is suddenly realizing he's been living in a bourgeoise bubble, and Bill Clinton dryly (and apparently without irony) points out to a general decline in the quality of living in this country, as if his actions in the 90s had nothing to do with it.
A chorus of media voices weighing in on the state of the American economy while keeping blinders carefully angled to deflect private financial power's bad behavior? Such a smorgasbord of commentary resembles, to me, a witches' brew of presuppositions, apologetics and amnesia that requires a cool yet fiery voice to lay it all out logically. Not me. But thank God Salon gave us Andrew O'Hehir's biting, informed synthesis this morning:
"What I perceive in the Sorkin interview is that Obama has sincerely tried to hew a path through what might be called the center-left of mainstream economics. He has pursued a reform agenda that (in his telling) is more ambitious than it appears on the surface, in hopes of renewing capitalism’s promise of universal prosperity and relative social harmony. Obama is eager, he tells Sorkin, to move the American political conversation past “the mythology around austerity politics or tax cuts, or the mythology that’s been built up around the Reagan revolution.” He does not, however, seem to question the mythology built up around capitalism itself, the idea that so-called free markets dominated by large corporations and financial institutions, and driven toward the endless expansion of production and consumption, will benefit everyone and comprise the natural and necessary ground for democracy."Read it and weep. And happy May Day.
