The group of people he is surrounding himself with seem like they are recruited from the temple not the countryside.

Definitely. It's all Clinton retreads. He's even sending his kids to the same school Chelsea Clinton went to.

He seems more like a populist pandering to the biases and desires of the majority as opposed to someone willing to lead that majority in the correct direction.

Yes, but to me it's not unexpected. That is clearly what he was, even during the primaries. I doubt he'd have been elected otherwise.

I am expecting Obama to be very conventional, despite the talk of change. Just the fact that he's black and relatively young is about as much change as the average American is ready to accept. He has to be very careful not to seem radical. More so than an old white guy.

It's another variation of "only Nixon could go to China."

America was not ready for FDR until the depression was well established. They are not yet ready for another FDR and if that is to be it will probably be the next guy.

Ah, but there are many "Americas."

There is the "America" that is made up of the fat cats from Wall Street, who gave so generously to Obama. And there is the "America" composed of the whites in the middle, the lower middle class and the blue-collar people, who also opened their hearts and wallets to Obama. Obama's coalition is a coalition built on natural enemies.

Obama thinks he can have it both ways. He can't. The financial and business elite really are like Freddy Krueger. They seem to have this uncanny ability to come back from the dead, and they take no prisoners.

It's unfortunate that Obama has to re-invent the wheel, that he can't learn from FDR's experiences. It was the school of hard knocks that taught FDR the true nature of the "financial royalists". I of course have no window into Obama's heart of hearts. Perhaps he doesn't want to learn. If so, this will be a sad betrayal of the millions of hoi poloi who converged on his web site, who gave him their votes and small donations of $10 or $20 or $50.

FDR's first response, not unlike that of Obama, was to try to play ball with the corporate elite. They stabbed him in the back, and it was from these bitter experiences that he finally came to dub them the "economic royalists." Frederick Lewis Allen explains:

The evidence was fast accumulating: the (Roosevelt) Administration's great experiment in 'business self-rule’ had come into full collision with the ingrained determination of business executives to hold down their cost of doing business, to push up prices if they could, and in general to run their companies as they pleased, come hell, high water, or General Johnson. Where they could turn the machinery of the NRA to their own ends, they did so--and it was they, not labor or the consumers, who held the initiative in framing the codes. Where they could not turn this machinery to their own ends, some of them complied; others fought the law or nullified it…

Intermittently throughout the year 1933 the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, with the aid of its inexorable counsel, Ferdinand Pecora, had been putting on one of the most extraordinary shows ever produced in a Washington committee room: a sort of protracted coroner's inquest upon American finance. One by one, a long line of railroad and public-utility holding-company promoters, stockbrokers, and big speculators—had filed up to the witness table; and from these unwilling gentlemen, and from their office files, had been extracted a sorry story of pubic irresponsibility and private greed. Day by day this story had been spread upon the front pages of the newspapers.

The investigation showed how pool operators in Wall Street had manipulated the prices of stocks on the Exchange, with the assistance of men inside the companies with whose securities they toyed. It showed how they had made huge profits (which represented the exercise of no socially useful function) at the expense of the little speculators and of investors generally, and had fostered a speculative mania which had racked the whole economic system of the country--and this not only in 1928 and 1929, but as recently as the spring of 1933, when Roosevelt was in the White House and Wall street had supposedly been wearing the sackcloth and ashes of repentance. The investigation showed, too, how powerful bankers had unloaded stocks and bonds upon the unwary through high-pressure salesmanship and had made millions trading in the securities of their own banks, at the expense of stockholders whose interest they claimed to be serving. It showed how the issuing of new securities had been so organized as to yield rich fruits to those on the inside, and how opportunities to taste these fruits had been offered to gentlemen of political influence. It showed how that modern engine of financial power, the holding company, had been misused by promoters: how some of these promoters had piled company upon company till their structures of corporate influence were seven or eight stories high; how these structures had become so complex that they were readily looted by unscrupulous men, and so unstable that many of them came crashing down during the Depression. It showed how grave could be the results when the holding-company technic was applied to banking. It showed how men of wealth had used devices like the personal holding company and tricks like the sale of stock (at a loss) to members of their families to dodge the tax collector—at the very moment when men of humbler station had been paying the taxes which supported the government. Again and again it showed how men occupying fiduciary positions in the financial world had been false to their trust.

Naturally the composite picture blocked out by these revelations was not fair to the financiers generally. The worst scandals got the biggest headlines. Yet the amount of black in the picture was shocking even to the most judicial observer, and the way in which the severity of the Depression had been intensified by greedy and shortsighted financial practices seemed blindingly plain. So high did the public anger mount that the New deal was sure of strong support as it drove on to new measures of reform.

Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday

If Obama cannot resolve the conflict inherent in the coalition he has built, if he proves unable or unwilling to tackle some fundamental injustice in this country, if he just nibbles at the edges or strokes the symbolism, there will be a backlash. He will be a one-term president.

In this I am in agreement with Kevin Phillips:

Well, I think the Democrats have to figure on trouble. The Republicans have to figure on some opportunity for a rebound. But I think mostly they both have to think about that in a lot of ways they're a duopoly, a double monopoly that no longer has meaningful ideas but has entrenched interests. And if that's true again, and I think it could be, then Americans are really going to start to say, "How do we get something new in this country?"

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11072008/transcript3.html

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