Obama's Challenge

Robert Kuttner

Barack Obama approaches the US presidency at a critical moment in American history — facing simultaneous crises of war, the environment, and health care, but most especially in the economy. If he is able to rise to the moment, he could join the ranks of a small handful of previous presidents who have been truly transformative, succeeding in fundamentally changing America’s economy, society, and democracy for the better.

But this will require imaginative and decisive action as Obama takes office — action bolder than he promised during his campaign — and will be all the more difficult given the undertow of conventional wisdom in Washington and on Wall Street that resists fundamental change.

Decades of regressive politics and political gridlock have left America in its most precarious situation since the onset of the Great Depression. The collapse of the housing bubble continues, as does the financial meltdown it triggered; a revival of 1970s style stagflation threatens; incomes continue to lag behind inflation; household and international debts pile higher; disastrous climate change looms; energy and food prices continue their escalation; and the ranks of un- and under-insured Americans grow — the clearest, and most heartless, example of America’s destructive inequalities.

Solutions to the country’s multiple challenges do exist, but they won’t be found in overly cautious or expedient quick fixes. With his exceptional skill at appealing to its citizens’ better angels, Barack Obama could be the right leader at the right time to re-awaken America to the renewed promise of shared prosperity, coupled with responsibility towards future generations and the international community with whom the US shares the Earth. Invoking America’s greatest leaders, Robert Kuttner explains how Obama must be a transformative president — or a failed one.

Robert Kuttner

Robert Kuttner is founding co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at the think tank Demos. He is author of eight books, most recently The Squandering of America: how the failure of our politics undermines our prosperity.

He was a columnist for Business Week for twenty years, and continues to contribute columns to the Boston Globe. His other writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Harvard Business Review, Columbia Journalism Review, and Dissent.

Earlier in his career, he served as a national policy correspondent for The New England Journal of Medicine, economics editor of The New Republic, a national staff writer and later syndicated columnist for The Washington Post, a regular commentator for NPR, and chief investigator of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

He was educated at Oberlin College, the University of California–Berkeley, and the London School of Economics. He has taught at Brandeis, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, and Harvard’s Institute of Politics. He lives in Boston with his wife, Joan Fitzgerald.

Website: http://www.obamaschallenge.org