But Greenberg was sympathetic. “Lippmann’s experience will be familiar to almost anyone who has written a book aspiring to analyze a social or political problem. Practically every example of that genre, no matter how shrewd or rich its survey of the question at hand, finishes with an obligatory prescription that is utopian, banal, unhelpful or out of tune with the rest of the book.”
President Obama’s address from Osawatomie, Kan., also had a last-chapter problem.
After eloquently diagnosing the way the economy has failed the middle class while enriching and empowering the top 1 percent, it ended by calling on Congress to extend and expand the payroll tax cut, raise the tax rate on income over $250,000 to 39.5 percent from 35 percent and green-light more infrastructure spending. The speech got right to the heart of our economic problems. The solutions got right to the capillaries.
Some commentators have responded by asking Obama to offer bigger, bolder policies. But the White House doesn’t have some folder marked “Awesomer Economic Agenda” tucked away in Gene Sperling’s old office. The economic plans the team has proposed are, given the composition of Congress and the realities of public opinion, the plans it supports.
So rather than reupholstering its economic agenda, the White House should take its cue from the speech it was honoring — the address Theodore Roosevelt delivered in Osawatomie a century before.
In that speech, Roosevelt argued that extreme concentrations of wealth didn’t just pose a threat to the incomes of the middle class or some abstract sense of fairness. They threatened the very workings of the political system. The richer the 1 percent became, the more political representation they could buy. The more political representation they could buy, the richer they could become.
And that inspired the speech in Kansas. “Every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office,” Roosevelt thundered. “The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.”
Today, of course, the corporation is legally considered a person, and the Supreme Court has granted it the constitutional right to spend an unlimited amount of money to influence elections — and to do so anonymously. Here’s Roosevelt again: “Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.”
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