'If Wall Street Doesn't Like It, So What?'

Sen. Bernie Sanders, appearing with me yesterday on the new "Current TV," succinctly summed up one of Obama's biggest problems--not just with progressives, but the Center and Right as well. Which is that in listening to Tiny Tim Geithner's advice and leaving Wall Street intact, Obama missed his FDR moment entirely: uniting most of the country around a common aspiration: removing finance's whip hand over the economy. So having botched his chance to be Franklin, Obama is now embracing Teddy, and using "square deal" language. Is it too late for substantive change? Oh, it's much later than it ought to be. But too late? Not with the right leadership. As I wrote in "Capital Offense," after the crisis of 2008:

"...one of the few issues in Washington that seemed to unite a bitterly partisan Congress was how to deal with the “too-big-to-fail” problem. Democrats deplored Wall Street's outsize role in the real economy and its lobbying influence, and conservatives were appalled at the way the capitalist system had been undermined and rigged in favor of big banks that introduced so much moral hazard into the markets. Yet neither side seemed to have the power to take on Wall Street, and they weren’t getting much help from Obama."