Roberto Unger, who has been a tenured professor at Harvard Law School since 1976 and taught Barack Obama — a student in his “Reinventing Democracy” class — says the president “has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States.”
- “His policy is financial confidence and food stamps.”
- “He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests and left workers and homeowners to their own devices.”
- “He has delivered the politics of democracy to the rule of money.”
- “He has disguised his surrender with an empty appeal to tax justice.”
- “He has reduced justice to charity.”
- “He has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunity to the important but secondary issue of access to health care in the mistaken belief that he would be spared a fight.”
- “He has evoked a politics of handholding, but no one changes the world without a struggle.”
I have to agree with the professor. The isolation of the White House is no place for an abstract thinker. There, he doesn’t have constituents; he has only ideas. Even lobbyists and corporate CEOs are abstractions, represented by the sign of $.