In early December, I asked whether President Obama would choose to be more like Hoover, or more like FDR. Well, I guess it’s definitely Hoover.

Coming back to the question of whether we are expecting too much from this President, I think we are expecting from him only that he will work hard, and with some success, to achieve the outcomes he promised. In many cases, we think he has abandoned those outcomes, for fear of antagonizing various corporate interests. In fact, we see him as so far representing their well-being and not ours; as being a Wall Street President like Hoover, and not a Main Street President like FDR, Truman, or even Lyndon Johnson.

We don’t like that. We also don’t like his attempts to marginalize us. To call those of us who insist on a good public option as “the left of the left,” and to say that those of us, like myself, who are Medicare for All people are just impractical idealists, or to say that those economists, some of the finest in the world, who earlier wanted a strong enough stimulus to bring us back from the recession are “impractical,” even though they were right, and he was obviously (long-term unemployment of 10% now being forecast) way off base. Put simply, we feel betrayed, and increasingly bitter and mistrustful of this Administration. It has a long way to go to regain our trust, if that’s even possible.

Barack Obama resembles Hoover more than Lincoln or Roosevelt