Decisions, Decisions
About as accurate a summation as I think you’re going to find regarding Obama’s fundraising vs. grassroots predicament going into next year’s election, from Robert Johnson, in the pages of the New York Review of Books:
President Obama, like all elected officials, has to deal with the two currencies of electoral politics: money and votes. He plans to raise $1 billion, and much of it will have to come from the small part of the electorate in which prosperous members of the corporate world are prominent. There is an obvious difficulty for Obama in getting the well-to-do to support spending on health and education systems to strengthen an American workforce on which many of them do not depend for their livelihood. Globalization, in which foreign workers often displace American corporate employees, and technological innovation, which can also, in some situations, reduce the number of American employees, both have a strong influence on politics. The top 10 percent of income earners have gotten more than 100 percent of the income gains over the last thirty years—a percentage only made possible when the bottom 90 percent of income earners lose ground. The top 1 percent, moreover, has gotten two thirds of those gains.
These figures tell you where you have to go to get tax revenue and campaign donations. How does a politician raise $1 billion while advocating policies designed to fortify a sinking middle class? Obama is at a crossroads where the forces that have been tearing apart middle-class society—globalization and technological advance among them—have put the middle class in conflict with the donor base of both parties, which partly depends on those same forces for its prosperity.
So, which way will Obama go?
