Here's one you may have missed; I know I did (via Ezra):
In eight trips outside Washington since Election Day, Obama - who frequently says he uses such travel to better understand the lives of Americans - has held almost no formal meetings with groups of unemployed people or organizations that advocate for them.
White House officials were unable to give a single example of him on these trips interacting, even in private, with a person who had recently lost a job, although they emphasized that they don't know about every person with whom Obama has talked.
This will surely serve as yet more proof to the Versailles Theorists (in my head, the Lambert post at Corrente practically writes itself), but the problem being highlighted seems like more than a story about a Washington bubble and serving a corporate elite. Who's been noticing that the President hasn't taken time to meet the unemployed? And who, really, is going to be dismayed by it?
One of the troubles I've had with "Versailles" has to do with a fundamental narrowness in the definition; by focusing on a small(ish) cadre pf Washington elites in politics, private business and the media, we miss a larger picture - that there's a reason Obama was elected and that his real base of support is among a part of the Democratic Party that doesn't usually get pulled into the "Versailles" definition, but probably belongs there: the college educated, upper middle class professionals who share the kind of abstracted liberal views that Obama's espoused, who tend to be more about the ideas and less about the practical applications of liberal thought.
Having the President meet unemployed people, after all, is symbolism: the real hard work of doing things like offering safety net programs, unemployment insurance and such is what one really wants done. Meet and greets can put a face on an issue, buttress an appeal for national sympathy... but helping people in need is more than a symboplic exercise and it won't help if the Administration's response to this bad press is pretty pictures and lip service. Despite grand announcements of a great reshuffling of his economic team, the fact remains that this is a White House that has not had great economic policies, and has been especially slack on making a priority out of helping the people most in need.
And as bad as that is... the real problem is that a large majority of Democrats are prepared to reelect Obama, regardless.
I tend to think it's a mistake to read into President Obama much more than the intellectual and social limitations of his class: it's easier for upper iddle class professionals to see poverty and unemployment as an abstraction than to face the painful, difficult realities of hardship. Helping people in poverty, helping the long term unemployed... this isn't easy, and it's not inexpensive, and it's not a recipe for short, near term success.On issue after issue, this is an Administration chock full of "Best and Brightest" types who mouth a familiar language of positivism and empowermentand try to do good on the margins. And that appeals, best and most, to a class of educated professionals who do much the same things in their lives and careers.
And of course, the obvious point is that, especially in this post midterm election landscape, the alternatives are much worse: if it's President Obama dn his team vs. Scott Walker, Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie, then yes, the choice is clear. It's a false choice... but not false for the "Versailles" reasoning some people prefer. It's a false choice because the change that's needed is among liberals, within the Democratic Party and within the lower and working class left. The change we need is rejecting the control of a liberal agenda by an educated, professional elite. And the painful reality is... it's not happening. Lots of people would rather not think about poverty and unemployment and a host of difficult economic problems. And so we wind up with the middling choice of hard charging "realists" or Oprah-style empowerment junkies... when what we need is someone to take the even harder, less popular stance that we need to do less for people who already do quite well, and do more for people actually suffering and actually in need. Of course, to do that, it would help to see the people in need, and stop treating them, and their problems, as abstractions.
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