Obama: Wall Street's pet
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080918_no_time_for_a_minimalist/
[A] Reuters’ poll shows John McCain leading on economic issues.
The numbers are tragic but predictable. Until this week, Obama largely avoided the contrasting FDR-style populism the nation wants and the moment demands.
For example, instead of endorsing forceful re-regulation months ago when the financial meltdown commenced, Obama responded with a vague white paper that not only offered few hard-hitting prescriptions but denigrated key Depression-era regulations.
Likewise, despite slipping in the industrial heartland, Obama has muted his criticism of NAFTA. Indeed, one Obama adviser last week called trade only “an issue of symbolic importance.” Another said that far from opposing a controversial NAFTA expansion into Colombia as promised, the candidate now wants “to make it possible.”
The self-defeating behavior reflects both money and orthodoxy.
Obama has raised $9.8 million from investment houses (more than McCain). For economic advice, he relies on people like Robert Rubin-the NAFTA architect who gutted market regulations as Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and who then tried to rustle up government favors for Enron as a $17-million-a-year executive at Citigroup, a bank embroiled in today’s implosion.
Under such influences, Obama sends Wall Street hints that his “change” mantra might be empty rhetoric. This month, his adviser Cass Sunstein told The New Republic’s Establishment readership that the senator is merely “a minimalist.” In a recent New York Times interview, Obama himself reiterated his loyalty to free-market fundamentalism, even as it birthed the current emergency.
...
Polls show majority support for tougher regulation and fair trade reforms-the very agenda opposed by the Washington and Wall Street elites who populate Obama’s kitchen cabinet. The Democratic candidate’s “minimalism” therefore isn’t a desire to “accommodate, rather than to repudiate, the defining beliefs of most Americans,” as Sunstein sententiously claimed. It is fealty to elites rather than the public-the dictionary definition of elitism.