Eight criticisms of Pres. Obama

Commenter Richard Genz offers the following criticisms of Pres. Obama on Krugman’s blog:

  1. Capitulation to Wall Street as seen in the easy conditions for bailout money. Loyalty to [former Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner. Backing down from Elizabeth Warren at CFPB.  [Note:  That worked out for the best with Warren though.  If she’d been appointed head of CFPB then it’s very unlikely we’d have her as our senator.]
  2. Slow walking US climate leadership, in fact, not leading at all until 6 years in.  [Note:  See this interview with Obama advisor John Podesta.]
  3. Acceptance and promotion of most damaging fallacy that government must tighten its belt like households must do
  4. Lending credence to “grand bargain” strategy to unwind Social Security and Medicare [Note:  Paul Krugman weighs in on the subject.]
  5. Gross incompetence in managing government agencies: HHS w/ healthcare.gov and now the VA. Very slow to enforce discipline and integrity at US agencies by shaking up staff
  6. Allows FCC to float Internet rules to favor corporate giants
  7. Allows Eric Holder to continue avoiding real prosecution of financial crimes like mortgage fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, rate-rigging  [Note:  See Matt Taibbi on Holder and the Justice Dept. here and here.]
  8. Failure to understand dynamics of American oligarchy

I’d probably drop #8 because a) the charge is a bit abstract and b) I think he does understand but is not inclined to challenge it.  Other than that though it’s a pretty solid list.  I would add to the list Obama’s hesitation to reign in domestic surveillance by the NSA.

All things considered, I believe Roger Hodge had him accurately sized up in “The Mendacity of Hope“.   The article is from February 2010.  Here’s an excerpt (emphasis mine):

That Obama is in most respects better than George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, or Joseph Stalin is beyond dispute and completely beside the point. Obama is judged [by many of his supporters] not as a man but as a fable, a tale of moral uplift that redeems the sins of America’s shameful past…

It is not surprising that unsophisticated children, naive Europeans, and Democratic partisans continue to revere the heroic former candidate, despite everything he has done and left undone. Nor is it surprising that the broken remnants of the old White Supremacy coalition hate and fear the man and will oppose him without quarter (excepting, of course, his war policies). Puzzling, however, is the fact that Obama, until fairly recently an obscure striver in the Chicago Democratic machine, continues to inspire perfervid devotion among intellectual liberals who know their history…

Let us grant that Barack Obama is as intelligent as his admirers insist. What evidence do we possess that he is also a moral virtuoso? What evidence do we possess that he is a good, wise, or even a decent man? Yes, he can be eloquent, yet eloquence is no guarantee of wisdom or of virtue. Yes, he has a nice family, but that evinces a private morality. Public morality requires public action, and all available public evidence points to a man with the character of a common politician, whose singular ambition in life was to attain power; nothing in Barack Obama’s political career suggests that he would ever willingly commit to a course of action that would cost him an election.

If you believe that’s inaccurate then tell me what he’s put his neck on the line for.  Where has he spent political capital trying to win support for an unpopular cause?