> CB: No. I don't agree that what you outlined was what Obama promised
> during the campaign.
Ok. We can agree to disagree whether Obama promised "improved unemployment and other benefits for the working class,including card check, as well as major public investments in infrastructure, social services, and alternative energy."
>He didn't campaign that far left. Wish he had,
> but he didn't. I did not assess him as a social democratic candidate...It
> would have been patently dillusionary to be seeking "bipartisan"
> Congressional support for a social democratic program. It would have
> been dillusionary to seek majority Democratic support for a social
> democratic program in the US 2008-9.
The leadership, base and programs of contemporary social democratic parties are not significantly different than in the Democratic Party. The Gordon Browns, Segolene Royals, and Frank-Walter Steinmeiers do not run run campaigns "that far left" of Obama - or to his left at all in any meaningful way. They equally promise to defend social programs from being dismantled by the conservative parties to their right, to cushion the impact of job losses in declining industries, and to modernize their economies and create jobs by investing in new energy-efficient and technologically-advanced industries, and don't go much beyond that. In government, they govern much the same way domestically, although, not bearing the burdens of empire, they are able to pursue relatively more enlightened foreign policies.
These parties could have run substantially the same campaign as the DP in the US so long as they, like Obama, did not admit to being either "social democrats" or "liberals". That is the only concession which they would have had to make to the more backward American political culture - but nothing in the way of program. By the same token, Obama could have campaigned on the DP's themes in Europe as a self-described "social democrat" without in any way alienating the supporters of these parties. Not for nothing do the leaders and base of the respective parties sense a deep ideological kinship with each other, as I know from my own experience in the NDP, Canada's social democratic party, where the identification of the party's leaders and base with the US Democrats predates Obama.
Like many US leftists lacking first-hand knowledge of contemporary social democratic parties, you perceive ideological and institutional differences with the Democrats which once existed but which have progressively disappeared in the postwar period to the point of convergence. But the fiction is a convenient one. It allows both DP critics to construct a mythical "social democratic" standard against which the American party can be judged and found wanting, and supporters like yourself to apologize for the DP's failure to move as "far left" in the American context as the social democrats are presumed to do in Europe.
* * *
MG: On the other hand, Obama never indicated that he would continue the
> Bush-Paulson program of bank bailouts. Summers had, in fact, written
> op-ed pieces strongly critical of that approach. When the
> administration continued the policy, it was not only a large part of
> the left which opposed it but a bevy of economists, former regulators,
> and financial journalists who had immpecable mainstream credentials.
>
> ^^^^
> CB: He voted for the bailouts in the Senate.
>
> What did Summers say ?
Point taken. Obama and the Democrats did vote for the bank bailouts, although with some reluctance, together with the rest of the Congress, and in a way which suggested they would not extend the bailouts and would focus instead on fiscal stimulus and mortgage relief aimed at "ordinary Americans". With respect to the banks, I recall Summers writing a number of columns in the Financial Times in which he seemed to favour a savings and loan-style "resolution", ie. liquidation, of the zombie banks rather than propping them up as the Japanese did - a widely held position before investors, central bankers, and government officials, including Summers, lost their nerve following the collapse of Lehman.