Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency (Paperback)

by Robert Kuttner (Author)
Key Phrases: first hundred days, subprime collapse, social outlay, United States, Barack Obama, Social Security (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Richard Parker on Obama's Challenge
Richard Parker is the author of John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. He is an Oxford-trained economist and senior fellow of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he also teaches a course on religion and public policy. A cofounder of the magazine Mother Jones, he writes extensively on economics and public policy.

This is a vitally important book--one which should be read whether you support Barack Obama or not.

It's a concisely reasoned and elegantly written essay on how a truly courageous president could lead us forward. A slender volume, it very usefully sweeps us past the often-overwrought speculation about whether this will or won't be a "transformative" election--akin to Lincoln's, Roosevelt's, JFK's, and even Ronald Reagan's--and on to the real questions of what such an election might accomplish, how, and why.

Obama's Challenge assumes Obama will be elected, but its author is hardly a captive partisan. As a highly regarded journalist and deft policy analyst, Robert Kuttner has been covering presidential elections--as well the politics of governance in the four years between them--for more than three decades. Experience has convinced him that the size and complexity of the problems America and the world are facing today requires an extraordinarily gifted leader--and he is willing here to affirm that Barack Obama might well be that person.

The book's unique contribution, however, is to shows us that the sheer magnitude of those problems will require a President Obama to use his gifts for specific ends--and what those ends should be. We must repair, Kuttner persuades us, the enormous damage that's been done over the past 40 years by heedless business deregulation, careless globalization, massive deficits, environmental neglect, arrogantly unilateral use of military power, increasingly regressive tax system, and most important, by a relentless denigration of the clear value of government itself by those in the highest public offices--even though democratic government has always been and is now, the precondition, not the enemy, of America's past achievement and future hope. In doing so, he cogently explains how derelict conservative ideology, combined with a deformed bipartisanship, led to this situation, how presidents of great potential have in the past became transformative leaders--and how President Obama could take up the promise he offers now, and shape it into the world we need.

Kuttner is refreshingly realistic nonetheless about the roadblocks and pitfalls ahead. Hardly utopian himself, he urges Obama--and his supporters--to grasp the full requirements for transformative change in terms of leadership and values.

In the past, Kuttner has shown himself to be highly adept at parsing complex policy alternatives, but he somberly cautions the new president away from such a path by quoting Lincoln's dictum, "With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed." What he elegantly demonstrates instead is that Obama must mobilize the country by helping us take the imaginative steps forward that will allow us together to remake--and redeem--the nation. And if Obama takes time to read this essay before November, it will significantly enhance his prospects of first reaching the White House.

No one can possibly know what lies in store for an Obama presidency--or whether he will in fact reach the White House. This is the only book, however, to cogently explain why and how we must tackle now the great problems that have been so so carelessly created, and by reflecting on earlier transformative presidencies, offers us the map by which President Obama (and we) might chart a truly tranformative presidency.

From Publishers Weekly
In the latest from Kuttner (The Squandering of America), the liberal author and commentator correctly anticipates the economic failures only recently unfolding, and proposes a bold, transformative plan he believes can only be carried out by presidential candidate Barack Obama. Following the dubious tradition of pre-election expectation-raising, Kuttner proposes a veritable wish list for liberal economists-like permanent investment in public infrastructure, energy independence, active labor market policy (good jobs at good wages), professionalization of human services work like elder- and child-care, housing subsidies, universal health insurance-and why they'll pay off in jobs, health and wealth. Estimating the cost of all these programs at $600 billion until 2010, Kuttner finds convincing reasons to hope for these changes. Comparing Obama's role to FDR and Lincoln's, Kuttner believes the Illinois senator has the ability to inspire the public, and Congress, to carry out this agenda; as timely and apt as it is, left-leaning readers may be energized, or they may be in for quite a bit of disappointment.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing; 1 edition (August 25, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1603580794
• ISBN-13: 978-1603580793
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #44,504 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding book on multiple levels, October 12, 2008

By	Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Ronald Reagan famously (and wrongly) said that government wasn't the solution to the problem; it was the problem. In fact, it is the solution to the problem. We have now suffered through thirty years of a federal government that has been intentionally impaired so that it will not function for the American people, but instead has worked almost exclusively for the needs and whims of big business. And big business isn't the solution to the problem; it is the problem. I've been arguing this with free marketers since the eighties when I engaged in countless debates with University of Chicago business school and economics students while I was a graduate student there. There they unleashed such asinine theories as that moldy oldie, "The private sector can do things more efficiently than the public sector." Well, no. The mess in the attempted rebuilding in Iraq and the Gulf Coast have proven that, if it was ever in doubt (and multiple independent studies have reinforced the common sense idea that the private sector is certainly not more efficient than the public, and is definitely less cost efficient, since they have to figure in a profit margin). The whole trickle down idea, which has been put forth repeatedly over the past century, has been shown to be false over and over and over again. As Will Rogers put in so well in the twenties, some people think gold is like water: put it at the top and it will just trickle down. But, Rogers insisted, gold isn't like water at all. Put it at the top and it just stays there. Which is precisely what has happened in the past thirty years, as real wages of the middle class have lowered, as the wealth has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population (in 1979 29% of the wealth was in the hands of the top 1% of the population, while today around 50% is in the hands of the top 1% -- and comically, 18% of the people in the US believe they are in the top 1%), and those living below the poverty line have increased. The whole idea of a self-regulating and self-correcting free market has been from top to bottom an unmitigated farce for the vast majority of Americans. And that was BEFORE the recent collapse of Wall Street.

Even more than when Robert Kuttner wrote this superb book (which follows other very fine analyses of the economic situation of our economy like EVERYTHING FOR SALE: THE VIRTUES AND LIMITS OF MARKETS and THE SQUANDERING OF AMERICA: HOW THE FAILURE OF OUR POLITICS OUR PROSPERITY), the current economic situation demands and calls out for the kinds of solutions proposed in this book. Unfortunately, 30 years of strongly held self-regulting market ideas have done immense damage to the economy (and it has to be remembered that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton also held versions of the same economic ideas made more popular by Reagan and made ridiculous by George W. Bush -- and before the increasingly heard defense of Reagan be made that while Reagan was a true conservative, Bush is not, please recall that Reagan undersaw larger increases in spending as a part of GDP than Bush, most of it on military spending -- though to his credit, when Reagan saw the massive deficits his economic policy was building up he did the responsible thing and raised taxes). One one-star reviewer of this book mentioned Kuttner's appearance Colmes and Hannity's show. I strongly urge people to go to Youtube and view it. Yes, they called each other names (though Sean Hannity truly is an idiot and he truly does merely ape GOP talking points), but what that reviewer neglected to mention is that Hannity took great exception to Kuttner's claims that the economy was in a dire mess. Hannity insisted that the economy was in great shape, that Bush had performed miracles. This was a couple of days before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and AIG had to seek a $70 billion line of credit from the Fed. My point is that Kuttner absolutely nailed what was wrong with the economy; if anything, the economy was worse than Kuttner said. Hannity was refuted by the events of the next couple of weeks more thoroughly than any TV interviewer (Hannity is right in describing himself as an "interviewer" and not a journalist). Kuttner was completely and utterly vindicated.

The brute fact is that our economy is -- and actually has been -- a mess. Wall Street is collapsing right now, but the quality of life for the bulk of Americans has been gradually eroding for decades. It was not, as Reagan optimistically crowed, dawn in America, but dusk. The next president will come on the scene at one of the most critical moments in American history, not merely at the end of eight miserable years overseen by the worst president in American history, but three decades of government that ignored or neglected the middle class and privileged instead crackpot free market economic pablum. Some take exception that Kuttner assumes that it is only Obama who can be looked to as the bringer of changes; McCain, after all, might win (though that seemed far more likely a month ago, before the implosion of the economy and before Sarah Palin gave a vast number of Americans another reason to vote for Obama). But the brute fact is that McCain truly is just more of the same thing we've seen since Gerald Ford. Though he acknowledged at one point that the knew nothing about economics, what he has said has persistently been the free market party line. Before the collapse of Wall Street, McCain never found a regulation that he liked. For McCain there was no such thing as too much deregulation. So if we want change, Obama is the only game in town. But not just that; he has often spoken of solutions and gestured towards directions that would be definite departures from the past three decades. He has talked of the kinds of ideas that drove United States policy from the beginning of the New Deal until the onset of deregulation and Reaganism, decades that saw some of the greatest decades of economic growth in American history and the greatest expansion of the middle class. We need to go back to what worked and what worked was government using its power to assure that the middle class has a share of the American dream just as the wealthy do. Like Roosevelt put it, America is not better off unless all Americans are better off.

Kuttner lays out a broad and ambitious program of new government programs that would go a long ways towards undoing the unremittant harm inflicted over the past few decades. These include such programs as universal health care and a dramatic increase in the expansion of alternative energy sources.

What has been lost in the unceasing criticism of government by Reagan and his followers is that government has done a vast number of extraordinarily fine things. It has done far less in the past few decades because it has not been allowed to. If people merely reflected a bit instead of succumbing to brainless anti-government rhetoric they would easily think of dozens of tremendous successes by government. Just a few examples of government at work: the national highway system; most of America's bridges; social security (which even Reagan promoted as a very great thing); clean air and clean water; the national park system; medicare and mediaid; food stamps (so people without money will not starve); guaranteeing civil rights, so that blacks voting today don't have to guess how many jelly beans are in a bowl to be able to vote; the space program; the Bill of Rights; consumer protection (that bans products like the over the counter medical product that in the late 1890s killed over a hundred people in about a week); the G.I. Bill; various programs that have enabled most people in American history to own their own homes; the control of the national water supply (otherwise there would be no one living in California); the National Institutes of Health; the breaking up of the Mafia; and a vast number of other programs and achievements. Anti-government ideologues want to pretend that there are no options other than an all-inclusive totalitarianism and a do-nothing libertarianism, but all of the countries in Europe and Canada that enjoy a better quality of life than we do in the United States (every year the U.S. slips further and further down the list of the countries with the highest quality of life) prove them otherwise. We need government officials that actually believe in government again. We need to get back on track.

Many will be resistant to the kinds of ideas that are put forward in Kuttner's book because they have been steeped in the simplistic and easy-to-digest and parrot ideology put forward on the right from Reagan to the present. One of Reagan's most dubious achievements was convincing people that there were simple answers to complex problems. Yet the world remained complex while people's thinking about it became increasingly simplistic and out of touch. The free market mantra was an incredibly easy one to understand and apply. That it never worked successfully in any country in which it was tried never bothered these people. As Karl Polanyi presciently pointed out in 1944 in his great book THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION (directed at the Viennese School economists who were the teachers of Milton Friedman and other U.S. free marketers and still one of the best and most relevant books ever written about economics), a belief in the virtues of a radically free market is essentially utopian: it does not describe a world that ever has or ever could exist, but one that they could only imagine to exist. We need to get back to a nuanced way of thinking about politics and economics that addresses the way the world actually is, not the way that people imagine it should be. It is only a matter of time that the free marketers resume their mantra of laissez-faire and deregulation. Polanyi said that their response to any economic failures, even when the policies were put forward by true believers in the free market, would be to insist that the principles had not been sufficiently adopted by society, that the markets hadn't been sufficiently free, that there had still been too many regulations. It is pure hogwash, but a position that anyone with a high school education can adopt and apply.

If it sounds like I'm angry, I am. I hate that most of my adult life has been lived in a country that has become the testing ground for so many hare-brained ideas and crack pot nostrums. Not everything was perfect in the United States from the early thirties to the seventies, and there were times when there was a tremendous suppression of individual liberties in the country (though mainly by people who later would be most seduced by the kinds of thinking I've been criticizing in this review). But the middle class was expanding and for a huge number of Americans life made far more sense economically than it does today. What I would like to see is an America with the kinds of social and cultural progress made in the past three decades (with far greater racial tolerance as well as acceptance of all kinds of difference, whether religious or sexual orientation, and a true embrace of gender equality) with the kind of growth of the middle class that took place in the decades before Reagan. Like Roosevelt said, America isn't well off unless most Americans are well off. That is Obama's challenge, to put America back on the path down which we were led by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, and even Nixon. The pro-big business, anti-middle class policies of Carter, Reagan (especially Reagan), Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 have got to go.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We need change!, September 12, 2008

By	Donna L. Hayes - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Obama's Challenge (Large Print): America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency (Paperback)

I downloaded this on my Kindle and was finished reading in a couple of days. This is a very fair and balanced book which is refreshing. It emphasizes the importance of our current state of the economy, health insurance etc. and the massive changes needed to fix them.
I highly recommend this book.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outside the "economics box", September 5, 2008

By	Hazel Henderson "Hazel Henderson, Ethical Mar... (St. Augustine, FL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Robert Kuttner has performed a service in Obama's Challenge by bringing to the Democratic nominee's attention the pitfalls to be faced by the next Administration. The USA is facing a profound transition. Our citizens must adjust to the diminished role the US plays, economically, militarily and in its influence. While adapting to this new global reality and the rise of China, India, Brazil, Russia and other nations, the next US President must deal with the severest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the urgent need to shift our economy from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy.

I hope that Obama, David Axelrod, David Plouffe and all of his team will read Robert Kuttner's wise analysis and go beyond that outdated "economics box" so as to address more fully the systemic crises our next president will face.