"Hell, what's the presidency for?"

A book review:

Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. By Robert Kuttner. Chelsea Green, 2008. Paperback, 200 pages, $14.95.

The book was issued in September; if McCain had won, well, at least Chelsea Green printed its gamble on recycled paper.

From professionalizing the human service industry to centrally planning the labor market, the details of Kuttner’s policy proposals can be minute, but they don’t detract from his thesis: that Barack Obama may follow Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ in their most celebrated moments by renewing people’s faith in government as a force for good and uniting Americans behind a vision of a post-bubble economy we can all live with.

One large factor in whether a president is “transformative,” whether he can speak to people’s concerns and change public opinion and, in this case, renew people’s faith in government’s ability to help them protect themselves and fulfill their dreams, is a president’s ability to educate. Obama needs to make a public issue of the million private financial problems of American households. Then he needs to propose solutions that walk all over the fiscal restraints laid down by conservatives and centrists. Solutions that cost money, lots and lots of taxpayer money.

Name a policy initiative Obama has proposed and Kuttner would double, triple, or times by 10 the public outlay. Alternative energy, for example: Obama promises to support research and development with $150 billion over 10 years. A typo in his initial press release said $150 billion annually — more like it, says Kuttner, who might have added that that’s slightly less than the amount Congress may soon give to the dinosaurs of Detroit.

How to pay for it all? Roll back the Bush tax cuts, get out of Iraq; reduce military spending; close loopholes; tax Wall Street; and still spend more than we take in, with the rationale that a deficit is better than a Great Depression.

Obama’s Challenge is fresh reading to anyone who’s not steeped in policy minutia; it offers some plain discussion of how much moderate Democrats have conceded to a conservative low-tax agenda (“a race to a bottom that we never can reach,” in the words of Kuttner’s colleauge, Miles Rappaport) and hints at how Obama comes to the land’s highest office with the strength of character and independence of mind that might allow him to do what true leaders do: “staking out a position not held by a majority of voters, and bringing the people around… It is never simply a case of seeing where the country is, and going there.” Lincoln did this well with bringing the people around slowly to the idea of emancipation; LBJ did too, vowing from day one to enact civil rights legislation. When his aides told him he ought not spend his good reputation so early in his term, he replied, "Hell, what's the presidency for?"

Politics being what it is, a game of focus groups and strategists in which the liars guard the locks, Kuttner looks at Obama’s life history and sees a progressive to the core. Here’s hoping he’s right. More than that: Another factor in making a transformative president, perhaps the most important, is what the times demand. And what the times demand is often defined by what the people say. That’s where we come in.