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Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

Grading a president after 100 days always strikes me as presumptuous. The only real grade is an incomplete. And as good teachers will tell you, letter grades – as opposed to written evaluations – are inherently arbitrary and misleading.

One thing is clear. If we’re grading on a curve, Barack Obama ranks near the top, just below FDR. In changing course, getting bold things done, setting a tone, lifting our spirits and confidence, we haven’t seen anything like this since Roosevelt. Even Reagan, the great communicator, had a much harder time in his early days, starting with the limousine gridlock of his inaugural. He had to get shot to move his agenda.

Rather than just grading the president, I suggest we might profitably assess our own 100 days. Obama has stormed the national and world stages in his first weeks. But how have we done – particularly the progressives who have such a large stake in the success of this president – in relation to Obama? He has demonstrated remarkable mastery of the powers of the presidency to lead the country. Have we mastered the power of the citizenry to empower the president?

There is sophisticated organizing being done in support of Obama’s agenda. New organizations – most notably the 13 million person Obama for America – and old have joined together to mobilize citizens around the president’s key initiatives. Major groups with large memberships – from unions to MoveOn, community and citizen action networks — have coordinated target lists, messaging, and activities. Increasingly their attention is focused on herding Democrats, which will intensify as Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision to switch jerseys makes Republicans even less relevant.

Similarly, on core issues — health care reform, new energy, college affordability, immigration, empowering workers- large independent efforts are underway. The unions and other progressive groups are taking on the corporate lobby over the Employee Free Choice Act. Health Care for Americans Now leads a range of coalitions pushing health care reform. Environment and labor groups have been actively mobilizing around green jobs and new energy.

These independent efforts will help define the scope of the reforms, engage the public to support them, and strengthen the hand (or stiffen the spine) of Democrats in negotiations. Neither the public plan in health care nor cap and trade on carbon emissions will survive without popular mobilization.

For the most part, progressives have been happy to support and reluctant to question the popular president. So the fateful commitment of 60,000 troops to Afghanistan was made without much opposition, nothing like that Obama joined when it came to invading Iraq. Human rights advocates did push the administration to open up the shameful record on torture and are now demanding investigation and prosecution. Progressives helped convince the White House to shelve a proposed task force to “fix” Social Security which would have been bad policy and bad politics. Progressive economists – Krugman, Stiglitz – and journalists – Greider and Kuttner and more – have challenged the administration’s banking bailout, and pushed hard for a stronger recovery plan. The call for a full investigation of the mess – a Pecora Commission – has gained some momentum in both the Congress and the media.

But what Obama has been missing has been an independent, obstreporous citizens’ movement demanding fundamental reform. Roosevelt had the labor movement, the Townsend Clubs, Huey Long, socialists and communists challenging him from the left. Johnson had the civil rights movement forcing his hand.

This kind of opposition isn’t easy. No president likes to face disruption particularly from what he would consider his base. There are similar stories told about both Roosevelt and Johnson meeting with leaders of the movements and saying something to the effect of “I agree with you, now go out there and make me do it.” But in reality, Roosevelt wanted to squelch Long and tame labor. And Johnson repeatedly ordered Hubert Humphrey to bring the civil rights demonstrations to an end, saying that they weren’t helping the cause. King got a lot of pressure – to say nothing of wiretaps and FBI investigations – to get back in step.

Yet it is precisely these movements – independent, disruptive, passionate, demanding bolder reform, taking on entrenched powerful interests – that enabled Roosevelt and Johnson to achieve far more than they ever thought possible. The New Deal we remember – Social Security, the Wagner Act, Fair Labor Standards, the SEC and Glass Stegall, progressive taxation – came not in the first 100 days, but as Roosevelt, under pressure from his left, geared up for re-election. The Voting Rights Act surely would not have been passed with Selma, and many other sacrifices transforming public opinion to enable Johnson to act.

The absence of these movements on the left opens dangerous space for ersatz populist movements on the right. We saw that with the tea-bag parties that Fox huckstered. We’ve seen conservatives conflate the trillions going to bolster the banks with vital spending in the recovery plan to get the economy going. They are weaving a corrosive message that ties big spending in Washington with Wall Street wastrels. The country would be far better served with an angry populist movement that indicts Wall Street but demands greater support for working families and Main Street. But anyone building that movement will have to understand that they might earn respect, but they won’t be loved in the White House.

For citizens, as with Obama, 100 days is too early to judge. In these first weeks, we’ve done a good job of organizing to support key elements of the president’s agenda. But we’ve seen little evidence of a progressive movement that can challenge the limits of that agenda, and rouse an aggrieved citizenry to open up the space for the president to act far more boldly.

Grades for the first 100 days? The president, I’d say, is doing a lot better than we, his supporters, are.

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

Will President Obama defend Social Security from the folks who want to plunder it? That’s the question Bill Grieder poses in a critically important article in the Nation Magazine.

We’ll get an early indication this Monday when the president convenes a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit,” designed as he put it, “to send a signal that we are serious” about America’s long-term deficits.” The focus will be on “entitlement programs” like Social Security and Medicare. “Everything will be on the table,” the budget hawks will get a platform, and rumors now suggest the president may announce a commission designed to “fix” Social Security.

The president is surely right about the need to address America’s long term finances. Doing so now is dicey, for the president has to convince Americans — and the Congress — on the need for more deficit spending: to pay for the bank bailout, finance mortgage relief and eventually a second stimulus to get the economy going. The danger — as Roosevelt discovered in the Great Depression — is to do too little and stop too soon, seeking to balance the budget before the economy regains its feet. But a long term discussion of America’s finances now could help Americans look beyond the crisis, defining where we need to go and how, in the long term, we’ll pay for it.

Progressives, of course, are worried about Obama falling for a trap set by the budget hawks, conservatives in both parties, the beltway establishment and financial elites, personified by Pete Peterson, a billionaire Wall Street baron. Peterson is spending a fortune trying to terrorize Americans about long-term deficits to justify hacking at Social Security and Medicare. Peterson, who made his fortune on Wall Street, never raised a word about the dangers of hyper leveraged finance houses gambling other people’s money. He never expressed qualms about the leveraged buyout artists who were using debt finance to rip apart companies. He didn’t fund an all out effort to stop Bush from raiding the Social Security surplus to pay for tax cuts for the rich. But now he wants folks headed into retirement who have already prepaid a surplus of $2.5 trillion to cover their Social Security retirements to take a cut tor work a few years longer to cover the money squandered on bailing out banks, wars of choice abroad, and tax cuts for the few.

Will Obama fall for this ploy? Not likely. In fact, his position on entitlements has been spot on. Social Security, he has argued, is basically sound, funded far into the future. If it needs more funds decades from now, lifting the cap that now cuts off payroll taxes at $102,000 would take care of the problem.

The real deficit problem, as Obama has argued, is caused by soaring medical costs. This isn’t a problem of “entitlements” like Medicare and Medicaid alone. It’s the result of our broken health care system that wastes over a third of its costs on administration, puts no limits on the costs of drugs, and does a terrible job limiting costs. Other advanced industrial countries spend far less of the GDP on health care while insuring all their people and producing better health results. Solve the problem of soaring health care costs and you solve America’s long term federal budget deficits. Fail to solve it and you bankrupt everything – families, companies that provide health care, state and national governments.

Obama gets this. That’s why he’s insisted on universal health care reform, and why he demanded a downpayment be made in the stimulus on accelerating the transition to computerized medical records and comparative treatment research.

So if the president sticks to his campaign pledges, the summit may provide a platform for the distortions of the budget hawks, but it won’t do much damage.

What we really need however is a true fiscal summit: a long-term assessment of our needs and our finances to begin framing a real “Grand Bargain” to pay for the investments we need.

That would start with what we consider to be the basics. I’d take the measure of a government that works that Obama defined in his inaugural address: a government that “helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”

Meeting those basic goals will require developing an expanded public social compact to replace the promises that the corporations have shredded – particularly affordable health care and a secure pension above Social Security. It requires expanded public investment in areas vital to a vibrant economy and democracy: notably world-class education, 21st century infrastructure, and investments to fuel the transition to new energy.

Despite our current travails, this is still a rich country. We can afford to pay for this.
Indeed, successful health care reform would save money. The gold standard Lewin Group estimates that Obama’s plan would save some $1.04 trillion over ten years.

New priorities could provide hundreds of billions more. For example, what if we decided to sustain the world’s strongest military by spending as much on our military as the next 10 biggest militaries combined? As Bill Greider reports in his forthcoming book, Come Home America, that would save an estimated $180 a year to invest in areas vital to our future.

Given America’s gilded age inequality, which has been worsened because of wholesale tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy, progressive tax reform is a moral imperative. Reform of the estate tax – with a complete exemption for fortunes up to $2 million per person ($4 million for a couple) would provide $60 billion a year. Repealing the Bush top end tax cuts for households earning over $250,000, as Obama promised in the campaign, provides another $43 billion a year. A small financial transaction tax on the buying and selling of stocks and other financial products — a vital reform to reduce excessive short term speculation — could generate $100 billion a year. Ending overseas tax havens could generate $100 billion a year from the unpatriotic corporations and wealthy (all figures from Chuck Collins of Responsible Wealth and the Institute for Policy Studies).

This doesn’t claim to be the last word. We can and should argue about the elements of any grand bargain. But everything should be on the table, not just “entitlements.” What are the promises we will make to one another to create a decent society? What are the investments we need coming out of this crisis to sustain the American dream in a global economy? And then, how do we pay for them in the most equitable and efficient way? Now that would be the Fiscal Responsibility Summit we need.

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                Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR): http://legacy.usw.org/usw/program/content/overview_sub.php?modules2_ID=774&modules_ID=775

Robert Kuttner

By Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem, to me it’s part of the solution.

– President Barack Obama, January 30, 2009

The great union leader John L. Lewis, who headed the United Mine Workers from the ’30s through the ’50s and helped organize millions of workers into the CIO, used to declare in organizing drives: “President Roosevelt wants you to join the union.” Roosevelt never said that in so many words, but FDR did strongly back the Wagner Act, giving workers the clear right to organize.

During World War II, Roosevelt’s War Labor Board made clear that corporations seeking war contracts needed to have good labor relations. In practice, that meant unions; and it meant “pattern bargaining” in which workers for different companies in the same industry got the same wages, so that companies could not play workers off against each other.

Roosevelt’s wartime contracting policies, the Wagner Act, and the militancy of the labor movement laid the groundwork for the golden age of American unions during the postwar boom. Not coincidentally, this was also the one period in the past century when the economy became more equal, and more secure for working people.

So, while Roosevelt’s words never quite urged workers to join unions, his deeds spoke volumes. John L. Lewis was well within the bounds of poetic license.

On Friday, President Obama, a onetime organizer, had more words to say about unions, and they were the kind of explicit endorsement that we literally haven’t heard from a president since FDR’s day.
“We need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests, because we know that you cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement,” the President said. “When workers are prospering, they buy products that make businesses prosper. We can be competitive and lean and mean and still create a situation where workers are thriving in this country.”
Wow!

And Obama offered deeds to match. This stunning declaration of support came at the White House announcement of a Task Force on Middle Class Working Families headed by Vice President Biden, with Jared Bernstein as its executive director. The idea was proposed last summer by Change to Win unions, who endorsed candidate Obama early in the primary season. He embraced the concept, and it was a commitment he kept. His remarks and actions were a dazzling example of the transformative power of a president to shift public opinion and the political center of gravity.

The task force, and the effusive and genuine embrace of the labor movement, came as a huge relief to union leaders, who have watched anxiously as nearly all the key economic posts went to centrist veterans of the Clinton administration, and the job of secretary of labor was not announced with the other senior economic officials. As it turned out, the appointment of Hilda Solis, a very pro-union member of Congress, was delayed because others had turned down the job first, but the delay sent an unfortunate signal.

Labor activists have also been worried about whether Obama will keep his pledge not just to sign the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) guaranteeing the right to join a union, but to work hard on its behalf with legislators, especially in the Senate. Since the election, the US Chamber of Commerce and allied anti-union business organizations have mounted a furious publicity and lobbying offensive with one message: Mr. President, you don’t need this bruising fight right now.

But the Chamber’s allies in the Republican House Caucus have beautifully undercut that logic. The Chamber’s premise was that EFCA would be highly divisive, at a time then the new president was seeking unity. With the wall-to-wall Republican stonewalling on the Obama recovery package, that premise is up in smoke. And the Chamber’s other allies, on Wall Street, have also done a service by inviting some salutary class warfare. Obama responded last week, calling Wall Street bonuses in the face of government bailouts “shameful,” and seems to genuinely view the growth of unions as a necessary counterweight.

The task force itself will be a welcome counterweight to the outsized influence of Wall Street inside the Obama administration. Several weeks ago, Jared Bernstein, then a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote a joint op-ed piece for the New York Timeswith Robert Rubin pointing out where they agreed. One issue where they pointedly disagreed was on the Employee Free Choice Act, which Rubin explicitly refused to endorse. The Biden operation now looks to be the go-to place for progressives seeing access to Obama’s priorities. The Task Force will serve as the White House center to review all proposals, legislative and administrative, for their impact on the effort to raise wages and rebuild a middle class.

Without Obama’s strong personal engagement, EFCA will be anything but a legislative cakewalk. Democrats may have a working majority. But at least five business-oriented Democrats are not considered certain votes for EFCA, and Obama will need to let them know that the White House considers this bill a top priority.

Our last two Democrats went out of their way not to get close to organized labor. Jimmy Carter did not lift a finger when the last big push to put some teeth back in the Wagner Act’s right to unionize went down to defeat by just two votes in the Senate in 1978.

On Friday, announcing the Task Force, Obama signed three executive orders. One will prevent federal contractors from discouraging their employees to join unions. Another will assure that workers keep their jobs when a contract changes hands. Down the road is an executive order to promote project agreements on construction contracts.

If Obama is serious, he can take a leaf from FDR’s book, and use government’s extensive contracting power to actively promote unions. Late in the Clinton administration, then Vice President Al Gore led an effort called the Responsible Contractor Initiative. The idea was to reward federal contractors who took the high road by providing good jobs and not standing in the way of unions.

It remains to be seen just how much real power Obama will give Vice President Biden. But the task force is a superb beginning. If government can just use its influence to make sure employers stay neutral, it will be a new day for the labor movement–and for American progressivism.

Robert Kuttner is Co-Editor of The American Prospect. His new book is “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

This blog was first published on Huffington Post.

Robert Borosage

Robert L. Borosage

Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

We are headed into the most ambitious era of progressive economic reform since the New Deal. The crisis leaves little alternative, as job losses mount across the country and the world. The Obama administration has hit the ground running, pushing to pass an $800 billion plus recovery plan, scrambling to put together a new plan for banks still on life support, and cobbling together an initiative to help millions of families on the verge of losing their homes.

But recovery, however daunting, is not enough. Even as the administration struggles to fend off a full-scale depression, it faces the task of constructing the foundations of the new economy out of the ashes of the old.

Republicans, still grousing about more tax cuts and less spending, are clueless. But even many Democrats seem to assume that if we just get the economy going, bail out the banks, add a dash of regulation, we can go back to business as usual.

But that is neither possible nor desirable. That old economy was founded on stagnant incomes and unsustainable debt. Families struggled to keep their heads above water by taking money out of their homes and assuming ever higher levels of student, car, credit card and consumer loans. The country served as the consumer of last resort for the world by borrowing staggering sums — $2 billion a day over the last years – from creditors abroad, largely Japanese and Chinese central bankers. That economy was floated on asset bubbles like that in housing which has now exploded in our faces. We can’t resuscitate the old economy – and should not want to.

The next economy must seek to provide a sustainable and a widely shared prosperity, one where the American dream remains in reach for working people. That will require new thinking and bold reforms. A group of progressive organizations have joined together to kick off this discussion. (For the first conference on “thinking big, thinking forward — already oversubscribed — go here.)

But many of the changes needed are clear — and the initial struggles over signature reforms are already teed up.

What is needed to insure to every person a job with a decent wage, a world class public education, affordable health care, and retirement with dignity? This is the pledge Franklin Roosevelt made when he laid out his Economic Bill of Rights in the midst of World War II. It was echoed in Obama’s inaugural address. Surely that new economy must include:

1. A new public social compact — affordable health care, pensions above Social Security — to replace the promises that the corporations have shredded. The signature fight over health care reform will begin this year. 

2. Sustained public investment in areas vital to a maintaining a high wage path in a global economy — world class schools, affordable college, 21st century infrastructure, cutting edge science, research and development. The first volleys of the signature battle — over whether we will sustain expanded public investment after the economy regains its footing or short-change it –are already being exchanged. 

3. A new global economic strategy — featuring a new industrial policy — that enables the US to balance its trade, while creating global rules that protect workers, consumers and the environment, rather than threaten them. The initial struggle over making the transition to renewable energy the centerpiece of economic reform is beginning. 

4. Restructuring and regulation of the financial sector, making banking a boring occupation again, devoted to making loans to the real economy, not hawking exotic instruments in operatic speculative ventures. The signature reform — taking over and breaking up the major banks that are on life support — is likely to be fought out in the next months. 

5. An aggressive wage policy that empowers workers to organize and bargain collectively, raises the minimum wage, and mandates basic benefits and safety standards. The donnybrook will begin this Spring over the Employee Free Choice Act. 

These are fundamental choices threatening entrenched interests. Health care reform requires taking on the drug and insurance companies. Sustaining public investment requires defeating the military lobby and the wealthy whose taxes will rise. A new global strategy challenges the multinationals that profit from the old order. Getting Wall Street under control threatens the largest political donors. The business lobby promises Armageddon if the Employee Free Choice Act moves forward.

President Obama has already signaled his intention to go forward with the core reforms in this agenda. So forget about a new era of bipartisan consensus and get ready to rumble. We’re headed into pitched battles that will succeed only with massive popular mobilization. We won’t have this opportunity again, and we dare not blow it.

Robert Kutner

Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect
One of the most coyly ambiguous lines in President Obama’s Inaugural Address was his pledge to “end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

That sounds high-minded, but you can read the promise two ways. Some heard it as a reproach to Republican ideology and to President Bush, who was seated nearby. Others heard it the latest reiteration of Obama’s desire to move beyond dogma per se and to achieve a new synthesis.

We will soon learn which it was. Obama, the president who would be post-ideological, is at last having his first encounters with the realities of polarized politics. Exhibit A is the stimulus package.

Obama has been more than generous in offering the Republicans far more tax-cutting as part of the recovery program than sound policy warrants. Will they reciprocate and support the rest of the package?

At Obama’s meeting last Friday with Congressional Republican and Democratic leaders, Republican Congressman Eric Cantor of Virginia was making the case that more tax cuts would be more stimulative than public spending. Obama replied in a jocular way according to those present, that the issue had been settled by the election, and “I won.”

Nothing post-ideological about that assertion.

More important, perhaps, was Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s reported statement that Senate Republicans would not filibuster against the stimulus package. But this may have been short-lived. In the official Republican response to the President’s remarks Saturday urging passage of the plan, House Republican leader John Boehner scoffed that the plan would “spend a whopping $275,000 in taxpayer dollars for every new job it aims to create, saddling each and every household with $6,700 in additional debt.”

On the Sunday talk shows, Republicans turned up the rhetoric. Even John McCain, who Obama went out of his way to court, called for more tax cuts and indicated he would vote no unless they were included.

The bill can squeak through without Republican votes, assuming no filibuster. But a more difficult balancing act may come within the Democratic Caucus. Obama needs not only some Republican backing or at least a Republican agreement not to filibuster. He also needs the support of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats. Their mantra has been that deficits are far too large. They were calling for spending cuts (and some tax increases) back when the deficit was less than 3 percent of GDP.

Even without Obama’s proposed $820 billion recovery program, the Congressional Budget Office’s latest budget projection shows a deficit of $1.2 trillion this year, or 8.3 percent of GDP. The sharp increase in the deficit is the result of the recession, which reduces economic activity and hence tax receipts. With enactment of the stimulus, the deficit temporarily rises to over 10 percent of GDP–the biggest deficit since World War II.

Most of the Blue Dogs, who include House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt of South Carolina, acknowledge the need for a temporary increase in public spending. Spratt’s opposite number, Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND), warned at a recent hearing that the United States was headed for a fiscal catastrophe. Conrad acknowledged “the need to have an economic recovery package that will add to deficits and debt in the short-term.” But he went on to sound the alarm about the “unsustainability of our current fiscal condition.”

This also suggests an ideological division that will be hard to paper over. After four decades of bipartisan assaults on government, many progressive Democrats (this writer included) hope to use the stimulus as a down-payment on an expansion of government services such as affordable housing and early childhood education that have been chronically under-funded, as well as long term investments in green energy and smart infrastructure.

But the 49-member Blue Dog Coalition in the House and Senate fiscal conservatives such as Conrad see the stimulus as a one-shot. They want sharp spending cuts as soon as the immediate crisis is past, to pay for the fiscal sin of a temporary deficit hike.

If you look at the details of the Obama recovery plan, however, it includes a lot of outlays that don’t look like one-shots: laying more than 3,000 miles of electric transmission lines; installing 40 million “smart” utility meters to help reduce energy use; weatherizing 2 million homes and most federal buildings. Among the other infrastructure investments are improving security at 90 major ports and modernizing the nation’s water system. These needs and others like them don’t end after two years.

Obama said Saturday in his first radio and video address, “This is not just a short-term program to boost employment. It’s one that will invest in our most important priorities — like energy and education, health care and a new infrastructure — that are necessary to keep us strong and competitive in the 21st century.”

Sounds good to me, but he will face ideological qualms from the fiscal conservatives within his own party, as well as from most Republicans. So the bipartisan honeymoon is unlikely to last, and I’d say, good riddance. Obama’s real challenge is to mobilize public opinion–not just to win general approval ratings but to make it very hard politically for anyone in either party to oppose his recovery program or to demand crippling budget cuts down the line as the quid pro quo. That’s what leadership is all about.

It’s show time. Call me out of date and ideological, but it’s reassuring when President Obama reminds himself and his opponents that “I won.”