DAILY BEAST COLUMN: ….What is not a waste of time, however, is using your pulpit as president of the United States to lay out a vision for the sort of society you would like to see America become. Barack Obama is going to retire in January 2017, but history isn’t likely to end then. [President] Obama knows that fighting climate change and getting universal pre-school and doing something to help the working poor are big jobs, long jobs. They’re certainly not going to happen under the current legislative configuration, and they’re probably not going to happen while he’s in office.
But they are going to happen. Even the knuckle-draggers will realize at some point in the future that climate change is real and something must be done. Universal or near-universal pre-school is a fact of life in most OECD countries, and someday it will come to pass in this one. And, someday, our country won’t be half-run by a bunch of lickspittles for global capital who think people earning the minimum wage just need to show a little gumption and responsibility. Yes, these things will happen, and when they do, a grateful country will look back in time and recognize the president who was the first to take these issues seriously (or in the case of the minimum wage, the first in a long time to give the issue such prominence).
This is confounding to the conventional political class. It’s a misuse of political capital. To them, a politician is supposed to play it safe and profess as his goals only those things that are potentially attainable. That Obama didn’t do that Tuesday night left them scratching their heads. Joe Scarborough decided that it must mean that Obama is preparing to go all out to elect a Democratic House majority in 2014 and make Nancy Pelosi speaker again—which he says, of course, in the same tone of voice in which one might say it looks like we have to let that drunk, schizophrenic relative move back in. Well, I hope Obama goes all out for a Democratic House. But he knows his history. He knows the odds are strongly against that happening. So no, that’s not his play… (more)
EDITOR: Speaking to the future was a very effective strategy for former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. As a progressive jurist on a conservative court during the 1920s and early 1930s, he wrote numerous dissents to the discomfort of some of his colleagues but which ultimately were adopted by the Supreme Court during and after his lifetime. Someone has to point the way.
