Media

Standing on the mall Monday among the great and diverse crowd who came to celebrate the second inauguration of the President, I reacted strongly to two aspects of the day.  The first was to the feeling produced by the crowd, to the moment itself.  The second was something else, something perfectly clear: a new American “demos” has arrived.

Imagine a company that is among the most profitable in the world, with a long track record of making money hand over fist for years on end. Except there is only one problem: As big as the profits are, they are no longer getting bigger quarter after quarter. The company has reached a plateau, at least for the moment, where it is still making an unbelievable amount of money; just not more money all the time. 

Cecilia Tkaczyk’s victory is the latest sign that New Yorkers want a different campaign system and they want it now. Tkaczyk challenged a millionaire Assemblyman in a GOP-gerrymandered district and yet, despite a cash disadvantage and little name recognition, she managed to win by 19 votes. And, she managed to win based on her support for publicly financed elections.

Washington, DC: Today, a petition on the White House website urging President Obama to “use the State of the Union to call for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics” exceeded the 25,000 signatures necessary to guarantee an official White House response.  The petition, launched by the groups Free Speech For People, Avaaz, People For the American Way, and Demos on January 8 took less than two weeks to cross the threshold.

The petition can be found here: http://wh.gov/P9j7

“My client only wants to look at employed candidates,”  said one recruiter. “The company. . . will not interview any professional not presently working,” said another. “Candidate MUST be currently employed . . .  "employed or only recently unemployed. .

Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz made some critically important observations in the Sunday New York Times. He pointed out that income disparity is a cause of the maddeningly slow recovery from the effects of the Great Recession, not merely a consequence of it. He drew parallels to the income disparity that predated the Great Depression.

The standard conservative rap on the social safety net is that it turns people into slackers by providing a comfy hammock and discouraging work and initiative. 

Yesterday, President Obama offered a diametrically opposite analysis: Programs like Social Security and Medicare, he argued, actually enable people to reach higher:

these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great. 

President Obama’s call for Americans to stay engaged has rightly been taken to refer to issues high on the public’s agenda, such as gun control and immigration reform. Essentially, the President is saying that reform reflective of the country’s most broadly held values can only be realized if people remain engaged and let their representatives know that they are paying attention.