Just to follow up on my earlier post and Chris's earlier post, as President Obama does his best to rhetorically avoid the "socialist" label for fear of countering the right-wing's free-market fundamentalist frame, the broad majority of the country is moving in exactly the opposite direction, telling Newsweek's pollsters it supports full-on nationalization of our banking system.
This is only the latest example of how the parameters of the political debate in Washington, D.C. (in this case, portraying nationalization as totally extreme) are way different from the parameters of the political debate in the rest of the country (in this case, nationalization being a commonsense step). As with so many issues over the years, what is considered mainstream and acceptable in D.C. is far to the right of what is considered mainstream and acceptable in America at large.
To be sure, no president can afford to completely ignore the skewed Beltway debate - that debate does have a distortive impact on legislation. But a president can hurt himself if he focuses only on playing within that Beltway debate.
I'm not saying Obama is doing the latter - in fact, I think right now he's rhetorically appeasing the Beltway while having been successfully backed into advocating solidly progressive policies.
That's fine by me in the short-term. However, the power of a presidency isn't only in its short-term legislative wins - it is also in its ability to shift the terms of the long-term political debate so that a whole era of new policies can happen. And I maintain that if Obama ratifies right-wing frames, he may still win short-term (and certainly important) legislative victories, but he may also lose the longer-term battle to change the very way America talks and thinks about political possibilities for the future.
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