Ed Kilgore wrote a good article over at Talking Points Memo that really can’t be repeated enough, Looking For a Mandate In November? Good Luck. Of course, it won’t matter. Regardless of what happens, pundits will claim that there was a mandate. It’s what they always do. What is most likely to happen is that the Republicans will get a small majority in the Senate. And this will be portrayed as a backlash against Obama’s “liberal” policies.

It’s curious. Pundits are supposed to exist to provide insight into the news. So you would think that the natural thing for a pundit to do would be to note that this election is six years after the huge Democratic wave election of 2008. There are 21 Democrats in the Senate up for re-election — 8 in Romney states. There are only 15 Republicans up for re-election — only one of which is in a state that Obama took in 2012. So what we should expect is that the Republicans would gain 7 seats. And that is exactly what we are looking at, although right now, Nate Silver is giving almost as much chance that they will gain 8 seats.

But I don’t expect to see much of this nuanced view during the evening of the first Tuesday in November. Instead, there will be lots of conjecture about what “the people” think. And it will say a lot more about what the pundit thinks. But the main thing is that we can depend upon the pundits to do whatever is simplest. We can’t have news analysis that’s any more detailed and honest than campaign ads!

Here’s Kilgore’s take on it:

To take it a step further, it seems that the only thing that matters in politics these days is turnout. So regardless what happens to the polls, we can’t much say what “the people” think or want. We can say that people are disaffected from politics. And we can say that we make voting far harder than it needs to be, even apart from Republican attempts to stop people from voting.

But part of the problem is just us liberals. The Pew Research report I discussed earlier showed that less than 70% of consistent liberals voted in primaries as consistent conservatives. I continue to grasp onto the hope that some day all my fellow liberals will realize that we have such a bad government that is so disinterested in the concerns of the people because we don’t vote. And not voting in primaries, makes it easier for Democrats to nominate economic conservatives like Clinton and Obama so that even when the Democrats win, liberals lose.

But this election? It means nothing. It looks very much like it is going to turn out exactly as the fundamentals predict. The geography itself is against the Democrats. And the politics are against them this year. If we end up with 48 or even 47 seats, it will be a neutral year. But don’t expect to hear that from the pundits.

It seems that Ben Bradlee has died. He is, of course, the legendary Washington Post executive editor who made the paper into something really great once upon a time. To me, he will always be Jason Robards in All the President’s Men. But otherwise, as usual, I don’t especially care. Celebrity deaths are just like the deaths of other people. Those who knew him grieve, but his death is hardly important. For the last couple of decades, he was better known for his wife Sally Quinn’s very inside-the-beltway cocktail parties.

I don’t mean to suggest that Bradlee doesn’t deserve respect. Not at all! A couple of years ago, I wrote an article, Ben Bradlee and Integrity. It featured a quote from Eric Alterman about Bradlee in his glory days, when he had just started his job as executive editor:

That’s pretty awesome. I understand the economics of newspapers were different then, but I don’t think most editors would have acted as he did. In fact, I don’t think many people have a single example of such integrity and strength in their whole lives. So that’s a fitting obituary for the man.

Martin Longman has a different take on this from the “Bradlee was God!” obituaries that are streaming out. He called it, A Contrary View of Bradlee’s Death. It is contrary, but I think a better word would be “nuanced.” His concern is not Bradlee as a man so much as Bradlee as a symbol:

I do wonder how long we are all going to look at the Washington Post and think of the great work they did on Watergate 40 years ago. Yesterday, I was marveling at the Pew Research report, Political Polarization & Media Habits. It contained the ideological makeup of the readers of 36 different news sources (including anti-news sources like Fox News and The Rush Limbaugh Show). It contained a tool that allows you to see the results for each source. And I was shocked to see that the Washington Post had an overwhelmingly liberal readership.

Why then is it that the Washington Post editorial page is so conservative? Well, I think it is that the paper doesn’t froth at the mouth the way the Wall Street Journal editorial page does. It is the very definition of Very Serious Thinking. So very much like Andrew Cuomo, the Post can claim that it is telling hard truths, just as it did during Bradlee’s early days. But then it was more interested in telling truth to power. Now, the Washington Post is all about telling the powerful’s truths.

This morning over at Washington Monthly, Jim Sleeper wrote, On Election Day, Let Texas Voters Tip Their Hats to Hong Kong. That headline is a reference to the fact that the Hong Kong protesters — and those at Tienanmen Square before them — made symbolic gestures to American democracy. It is interesting that destroying democracy should be the primary goal of one of the two major American political parties.

Most of the article is about the obsession with guns on the right. Guns are not a sign of liberty. They are a sign that if you have enough power, you can do what you want. And that has always been true. If you listen to people on the right, you will hear a constant refrain about taking the country back — as if the United States is somehow not valid if it isn’t doing exactly what they want. This dates back at least to the 1950s and the John Birch Society, as well documented in Wrapped in the Flag. And the whole point of the ostentatious love of guns is the not-so-subtle message, “If you don’t do what we want, we will make you do what we want.”

You can forget about everything else. The one defining feature of modern American conservatism is that it doesn’t believe in democracy. Yesterday, Bruce Braley quoted a conservative complaining about the politics in her state, “If Iowa gave power based on land ownership, the state would swing 180 degrees.” Indeed it would! And if only we just anointed Ted Cruz King of America, things would swing pretty far in her direction too.

All of American conservative politics eventually leads to Sharron Angle. She said what the majority of conservatives are thinking. Forget the “Second Amendment remedies” quote. In one interview after talking about how sporting goods stores couldn’t keep ammunition in stock because people were arming to fight the government for their “liberty,” she said, “That’s why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?” Someone who believes in democracy would think the next step would be organizing, educating, and generally sucking it up. But that’s not the fantasy of the conservative mind.

Notice how authoritarian this is. There are despots all over the world who are all for democracy as long as it keeps them in power. If they lose the election, well, that just means there was vote tampering and they have to declare marshal law until the situation is stabilized. This is no different than the conservative claim that they will try to “Take our country back!” at the ballot box, but if that doesn’t work, “Armed rebellion!” I don’t think they will actually do this, of course. They are mostly a bunch of chickenhawks who dream of their great guerrilla war. (I’ve got an idea: fantasy guerrilla warfare leagues!)

But these same people who complain that they are losing at the ballot box are the ones that are working so hard to suppress the votes of other people. So even their tepid support for democracy is anti-democratic! But it is based on the same thing that is behind, “Take our country back!” Just as the current America — Now and sixty years ago! — is not valid, many Americans are not valid. High on their list would be people like me and the kind of people who read this site. But it is pretty hard to stop us from voting without going full “King Ted Cruz.” So they go after easier targets — people even weaker than we are.

We have had this democratic republic for 226 years. It is sad that we now have to argue over the very idea of democracy.

This morning, Jonathan Chait wrote about some research that concludes something that I’ve been pushing for a while. It is that voter-ID laws are just a new form of poll taxes. If the people pushing these laws were really concerned about in-person voter fraud, they would have provided funding for photo identification. And they didn’t. They only added this when the courts made them. This is because the truth of the matter is that voter-ID laws have never been about supporting democracy; they have always been about tearing it down.

I’m not saying that the people who are concerned about voter fraud are actually anti-democratic. I think it is simply that in their minds shadowy people running around voting multiple times takes on a mythic quality. The rational concerns about voter disenfranchisement are nothing compared to what has become an existential threat to democracy in their minds. Of course, I’m talking about the Fox News viewers here. I think the Republican operatives who are pushing these laws are doing it as cynically as the people who created the poll taxes.

Here’s Chait’s summary of Richard Sobel’s report, The High Cost of “Free” Photo Voter Identification Cards (pdf):

And this isn’t even including the fact that some people don’t have the necessary documents to get photo-ID. For example, if I had to do so, I have no idea where either my birth certificate or my Social Security card is. But I’m sure I could manage getting photo ID if I didn’t already have it. I’m motivated and I have a lot of resources. But that’s the whole point of voter-ID laws. It isn’t to stop people like me from voting. It’s just meant to make it an bigger pain to vote for a certain kind of person — a poor person — a person more likely to vote Democratic.

But I’m not surprised that Republicans would look out at the electorate and decide that their best chances were to stop people from voting by creating the Poll Tax V 2.0. What I am surprised about is how conservatives in the federal court system would not find this a clear violation of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment. Let me just quote that amendment in its entirety. It ain’t complicated:

I suppose that we can quibble about exactly what a tax is. But the sad thing is that we have to. Republicans have been complaining for decades about liberal judges “legislating from the bench.” And I certainly think that some of that went on in the 1960s and 1970s. I still think that erring on the side of the weak is a relatively small sin. But during my entire adult life, it has been the conservatives who have “legislated from the bench.” And they have done it most abusively in giving more and more rights to companies and fewer and fewer rights to individuals.

And now we have five members of the Supreme Court who will twist themselves into knots to avoid seeing that the new voter-ID laws are just an update of the old poll taxes that were meant to disenfranchise a certain kind of voter. Will we need a Twenty-Eighth Amendment? The Twenty-Seventh Amendment took over two centuries for ratification. I don’t think we have that long.

I have a visceral hatred of James O’Keefe. You should know him as the con man who managed to get ACORN defunded by pretending to be an ethical investigator. His work has never shown what he has claimed, and the press could never be bothered to check out his claims before reporting them. My hatred is not primarily about the effects of his work. It is rather that as partisan as I may be, I still have a commitment to the truth. It bothers me when people try to finesse an argument. But when they knowing lie — in a way where it absolutely goes past any question of self-delusion — I go crazy. It doesn’t help that O’Keefe has been shown to be a fraud time and again, yet mainstream news still treat him as though he had something to offer. You don’t need any other information to conclude that such news sources are primarily interested entertainment.

These days, James O’Keefe is more known for sting operations that get revealed. For example, there was his creepy attempt to make some kind of a secret sex video of his attempted seduction of CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau. But most recently, he’s been sniffing around Colorado where he’s been trying to entrap the Democratic Party with his typically obvious stunts. Here is Andy Kroll at Mother Jones, Colorado Dems: We Caught James O’Keefe and His Friends Trying to Bait Us Into Approving Voter Fraud:

Rocky Mountain Vote Pride is pretty clearly a fake group. Their URL is held through a privacy company — not something that a grassroots group would do, but very much what an astroturf group would. It was created only on 10 July of this year and as the article noted, there is no contact information on the site. And I’ll add this: it looks exactly like just about every other astroturf website I’ve ever seen.

The “civics professor” wearing heavy makeup was James O’Keefe as shown in the photo above. O’Keefe tweeted it out himself, probably because his attempt to apparently plant incriminating evidence at the nonprofit group New Era Colorado was foiled. The tweet claimed, “I went in Disguised as 45yo, this time people may lose their jobs.” This time?! Like thousands of people didn’t lose their jobs as a result of his ACORN con?

Regardless of all this, what I think is interesting is just how unsubtle O’Keefe is. I think this is because as a Republican, he just assumes that the other side must be as unethical as they are. Consider voter fraud. Republicans are the only ones pushing it as a big deal. Yet the only major cases of it recently have been perpetrated by Republicans. So I don’t doubt that Republicans think voter fraud is a big deal; they know they’re okay with it. And O’Keefe thinks that Democrats must be just chomping at the bit — waiting for a college student to come in and suggest that they ought to vote for people who have moved away.

This is the state of Republican thought. The truth is that O’Keefe’s exploits are an embarrassment. They are very much akin to the John Birch Society and Robert Welch’s The Politician. But that caused the Republican establishment — National Review most especially — to turn on the group. But the Republican Party and the conservative movement more generally has lost all grip of what a republic is all about. This is why I call them proto-fascists: all that matters is power. And as long as the mainstream media are gullible enough to believe James O’Keefe’s newest scam, he will be embraced as a hero. Because he helps the Republican Party gain power. To hell with the truth.

Afterword

O’Keefe claims that big things are coming in the next week. And what are we likely to see: a heavily edited video with comments taken out of context. It will ultimately be the same thing it always is: nothing. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t get a lot of coverage.

Last month, I wrote about the then upcoming Gary Webb bio-pic Kill the Messenger. It is about how Webb’s reporting on CIA-affiliated smuggling of cocaine into the United States in the 1980s was attacked by the major press outlets. This eventually led to Webb killing himself. But I noted, “I’m sure… the press will push it as a story of one of their own, even though the primary reason that Webb seems to have taken his life is that no one would hire him.” Well, I was wrong. What I forgot is that a lot of the people who attacked Webb are not only still alive, but still working. So of course they aren’t going to laud them as the best that journalism is. Webb is long dead, but they still feel the need to attack him.

Recently, there was much coverage of the the Watergate break-in because of the fortieth anniversary. I discussed the coverage, Bob Schieffer Believes in Journalism That Happened 40 Years Ago. (Schieffer, of course, being the man who thinks that Edward Snowden should be thrown in jail — and maybe Glenn Greenwald as well.) In that article, I mentioned that if there had not been the incriminating tapes, Nixon would never have been forced to resign; Republicans would to this day be claiming that it was a small scandal; and most of all, journalists would not celebrate Woodward and Bernstein. And notice: the tapes are nothing that they uncovered; the tapes simply proved them right.

On Friday, Jeff Leen at the Washington Post wrote, Gary Webb Was No Journalism Hero, Despite What “Kill the Messenger” Says. And who is Jeff Leen? Well, at the time of Webb’s reporting, he was a reporter at the Miami Herald, doing work on the drug trade. And part of that work was to counter Webb’s work. It is almost twenty years later, and he’s still working that assignment.

Robert Parry wrote a great response to Leen at Consortium News, WPost’s Slimy Assault on Gary Webb. In 1985, Parry and Brian Barger broke the story in the Associated Press that the Contras — the rebels we supported who were fighting against the Nicaraguan government — were shipping cocaine into the United States. Webb’s work followed up on that, showing that CIA contractors were involved and that the CIA was complicit. So Parry knows what he’s talking about.

I highly recommend reading the whole thing because he takes Leen apart. Of course, it won’t matter to Leen, who is a typical career journalist whose biggest asset to a paper is that he will never file anything that would upset anyone powerful. But what stood out to me in the article is the way that people like Leen can continue to nitpick away at Webb, even while later events have shown him to be right.

That made me wonder what would have happened if Nixon’s tapes had existed, but didn’t get released for a decade after Watergate. Based upon the treatment of Webb, it must be that much of the media establishment would never have forgiven Woodward and Bernstein, much less lionized them. Here is Parry on an interesting comparison:

In another scathing attack on Leen’s article, Al Giordano and Bill Conroy at Narco News wrote, The Washington Post Needs a Bus — and to Throw Jeff Leen Under It. It makes the argument that the big three newspapers didn’t destroy the story because of its subject matter, but because Webb’s story was the first big news story on the internet. They were trying to kill electronic media and Webb was just a casualty of that. Here is Webb discussing the impact of the internet:

But what’s especially great about the article is that they interviewed Nick Schou, who wrote the book, Kill the Messenger. Leen took some quotes from his book to prove his case that “Gary Webb Was No Journalism Hero.” Well, Schou read Leen’s article and was not pleased:

The article also contains a bit of text from Webb’s book, Dark Alliance where he calls out the work of Jeff Leen. I’ve transcribed it:

Giordano and Conroy added, “Leen thought he could publish Friday’s essay without disclosing that it was none other than Gary Webb who exposed Leen’s early cocaine journalism in that passage of his book.” But the sad truth of the matter is that Leen will get away with the article. It’s been several days and I’ve only found a smattering of articles about it — only two of which were in Google News. And Leen will finish out his unremarkable and cowardly career and have a nice retirement. I’d like to believe that Giordano and Conroy are right and that Leen will be thrown under the bus. But it doesn’t work that way. People like Gary Webb who speak truth to power are thrown under the bus. People like Jeff Leen who kiss up to the establishment are cherished.

Update (21 October 2014 11:23 am)

The Rancid Honeytrap has posted an article about some other attacks and resources about the work that Webb and the work he did, Misremembering Gary Webb. It is very good.

Update (21 October 2014 1:46 pm)

Joseph Palermo at Huffington Post wrote a good overview of the history of the whole thing, The Gary Webb Story: Still Killing the Messenger. Also: Kenneth V Smith wrote, Yet Another Mainstream Media Attack on the Ghost of Journalist Gary Webb. After listing three article about Webb, he wrote, “The above are left-of-center websites, with which I normally disagree. I would like to find a right-of-center or libertarian article that is critical of The Washington Post’s attack on Gary Webb, but so far, nothing.” Funny that! Well, I have a clue. For the conservatives, well, they don’t want to hear anything that will shed a negative light on Reagan. There is a reason that liberals often refer to him as Saint Reagan: their love of him is faith based and facts will not get in the way. As for libertarians, well, as I’ve noted before, they aren’t much more than embarrassed Republicans. If the conservative movement had any substance to it, you would think they would love this story that paints a very bad picture of the government. And I expect that Reason will have something to say on the issue. But no conservative can get really excited about denigrating the Reagan years when they accomplished the one thing all conservatives believe it: Tax Cuts for Rich, Tax Hikes for the Rest.

Paul Krugman wrote an interesting column today, Amazon’s Monopsony Is Not OK. I don’t disagree with his overall conclusion: Amazon has way too much power. But when it comes to the specific issue of eBook prices, the situation is far from clear. Yes, Amazon is abusing its power. But the publishers are also abusing the public and their writers.

When CDs replaced albums, the music industry used the change to make a whole lot more money. At that time, vinyl records cost more to make and distribute than CDs. But vinyl records had cost about $10 at that time and the industry charged $15 or more for CDs. Whatever the market will bear, right? CDs were the new whizbang technology and even though the sound quality was worse than vinyl, CDs never wore out — at least in theory. So even though on the supply side, there was no reason for the record companies to make this extra money, consumers were getting something they thought was better.

Pretty much the same thing has happened with eBooks. When they first came out, publishers wanted to sell them for $15 a piece. But it turns out that publishers would be making the same amount for a $10 eBook as they made for a $26 physical book. So why exactly should the publishers get a huge boost in profits for doing less? Note also that publishers generally give a smaller royalty to writers. This is because the publisher get a higher percentage of the retail price. So the publishers think the new technology should enrich them, but not their writers. Nice!

But this all might be okay if consumers were getting something more from eBooks than they get from printed books. As a user of both, I think they pretty much are. For research purposes, eBooks are better. But for simple reading, it is at best a wash. I still prefer to read printed books. But I’ll admit that I am (1) more tactile than most people and (2) old. But there are ways that printed books are better. To start, I can sell them. They can theoretically last for thousands of years. And perhaps most important: I don’t need a device to read them. With records, one needed a record player already, so needing to own a CD player wasn’t a big deal. Someone entering the market had to buy a device just like always. That isn’t true of books.

Which brings us back to Amazon. It really is a problem. Right now, Amazon is behaving itself reasonably well. And its pricing policies really have done a favor for readers. But the whole dispute between Amazon and publishers just highlights the fact that capitalism only works well when real limits are placed on it. For over two decades, neither of the two major American political parties is at all interested policing the excesses of capitalism. And that, to me, is the bigger problem.

The fact that Amazon is abusing a huge publishing conglomerate like Hachette isn’t really on my radar of Really Important Things. But this whole issue has gotten a lot of play exactly because Hachette is a big company with lots of power. I was appalled recently when the company went whining onto The Colbert Report. And then, instead of being honest, they were allowed to present it as a great threat to writers as if publishing companies themselves hadn’t long been the greatest threat to writers.

A much more important issue is that Amazon pays its employees really badly. They pay their associates really badly. They totally ripoff sellers. But these are not likely to get the high profile treatment in The New York Times because, you know, they’re the little people. Of course, Krugman’s focus is on the ultimate effects on the little people. But that isn’t why anyone is paying attention to the Amazon-Hachette battle.

I’ve loved John Prine’s first album since I was a kid. One of the (many) standout songs on the album is, “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore.” It’s an anti-war song for the Vietnam era. The line following the refrain is, “They’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war.” But I don’t have much a visceral connection to the Vietnam War. So what has always spoken to me is the use of signifiers to represent which “side” you are on in complicated issues that really do not lend themselves to simple binary positions.

The best example of this is the yellow ribbon. These usually go along with the jingoistic slogan, “Support the troops!” I’ve given this a lot of thought and the reasoning behind this slogan goes something as follows, “The troops have to do whatever the government tells them. Therefore, supporting the troops means supporting whatever the government tells them to do. Therefore, support the war you commie bastards!” The yellow ribbon, just like the flag decal before it, is meant to shutdown debate.

The other side of it is that the yellow ribbons allow people to feel good about “supporting the troops” in a theoretical sense but to not do so in a practical sense. We have a long history of lavishing money on defense contractors while low-level military personnel live in near poverty. We go into war with high tech, whizbang devices (that made some rich guy even more rich) but without basic body and transport armor because, “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” And, of course, after the wars, the military personnel are largely forgotten. The conservatives who were so keen on “supporting the troops” tend to forget about the former troops and their needs.

This issue of the meaninglessness of such signifiers is discuss today by Danielle Kurtzleben at Vox, Pink Breast Cancer Awareness Ribbons Sell Because They Don’t Really Say Anything. It discussed how the pink ribbons mean something different to everyone. But as I have already indicated, they don’t actually say anything about the person or entity sporting one:

The article goes on to discuss how most businesses just see the pink ribbon as good PR. It’s just fondness by association. But this is nothing new. I’m more bothered with it on a personal level. What exactly would it say if I wore a pink ribbon? That I’m against breast cancer? That seems like a non-statement, like, “I’m against things that are bad!” Or perhaps it says that I’m in favor of finding a cure? Ditto. Or maybe it says that we should put more resources toward finding a cure for breast cancer? Well, there I have to break ranks. Sure, I’m for more research. But in our current “pay as you go” environment where we absolutely positively cannot raise taxes (and people are constrained in their giving), more money for breast cancer research is less money for something else. It would depend upon what that something else was.

Of course, pink ribbons don’t express jingoism. But otherwise, they are the same as the yellow ribbons. They either say something so vague that they are meaningless. Or they say something contentious, so they divide us. Kurtzleben briefly discussed this issue in her article. Recently, Susan G Komen has twice gotten into trouble by being something other than the anemic, “We’re taking a bold stand to be against breast cancer!” The first was the Planned Parenthood fiasco and then the pink fracking drill-bits.

I would never give Komen a cent, because their real intentions are too clear. No one is too dirty for them to partner with. If a rich neo-Nazi wanted to give them billions for the cause, they would take it. All that matters is that they get the cash for their one cause. Of course, it doesn’t even take billions (it probably would for a neo-Nazi); Baker Hughes only had to donate $100,000 to equate fracking with breast cancer awareness. What’s more, the Planned Parenthood case showed that Komen doesn’t even care about women generally. So unless you believe that nothing matters as much as breast cancer, I can’t see why you would support Komen.

That gets to the very heart of the flag decals, yellow ribbons, and pink bracelets: they don’t actually mean anything to the people sporting them. But they mean a great deal to the people pushing them. And what they mean is at best complicated and at worst downright evil.

Even if I didn’t agree with him almost all the time, I would read Thomas Frank because he is a great writer. But the truth is that I very rarely disagree with him. We are both liberal populists who think that there is a very big problem with the Democratic Party: it has turned conservative on the issues that most matter to people — economic issues. And that means we both get attacks — from fellow Democrats — who think that we just don’t get it. They think that if the DLC hadn’t taken over the Democratic Party we wouldn’t have had a Democratic president since Carter. They are wrong, of course. Political science tells us they are wrong, but they are as resistant to evidence as conservatives are. That may be because they too are conservatives and want to hide under a cover of being slightly reasonable about abortion and same sex marriage.

But yesterday, Thomas Frank wrote an article that bothered me, Paul Krugman’s Sloppy, Wet Kiss. It is a response to Krugman’s Rolling Stone article, In Defense of Obama. I had read it when it first came out and my reaction to it was more or less the same as Frank’s: Krugman is putting the too positive a face the Obama presidency. And Frank did it using an important idea from economics: opportunity cost.

I am completely with Frank on this. And I’m with him when he criticizes the fecklessness of the Obama administration in believing that the Republicans would want to work with him. Where I disagree with Frank is in thinking that Obama “seemed like exactly the right man for the job.” No! He never seemed like the right man for the job. During the 2008 primary, I wondered if Clinton mightn’t be the better president. For one thing, she had something to prove: that she wasn’t her husband. And she might be strong in standing up to the Republicans. There was never any doubt that Obama was a milquetoast politician and that once in power, he was going to yield to the same old power elite as ever.

It seems kind of obvious now. Only Nixon could go to China because he was such a rabid anti-communist. Only Clinton could destroy welfare because he was labeled a liberal (and even a socialist). And only rich boy FDR could really take on the power elite. The last person for the job was a black man so nonthreatening that the Harvard Law Review allowed him to be president of it.

None of this is to say that Obama is bad. I admire him. I think he has been about as good a president as we are ever likely to have. I can say that because I am a pessimist. But no one who tells you he is going to bring “change” is actually going to bring change. People who bring change tell you what they are going to do. And that’s why any liberal bringing actual change would be cut to pieces. Our “liberal” media would never allow it. We’ve seen conservatives bringing change and they’ve delivered. Oh, how they’ve delivered! And we never learn. But all you have to do in this country is shout “Socialism!” and everyone cowers under our bridges that are falling down because of lack of infrastructure spending.

So I understand why Obama is the president he is. What I don’t understand is why someone as smart and insightful as Thomas Frank would ever have been fooled. Obama is an establishment man through and through. And he always was. He never meant “change” to be anything that would threaten (Even just a little!) the power elite.

See also: Obama’s Hope Is There’ll Be No Change