The American Prospect

In the prologue to The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis explains that he envisioned his first and perhaps most famous work, Liar's Poker, as a grim obituary for an industry that rewarded inexperience and greed. However, the byzantine banking industry continued to flourish, and young readers wrote Lewis to ask how they, too, could get into the game. His disappointment is palpable.

On Monday, President Barack Obama released a complimentary statement about Sen. Chris Dodd's latest proposal for financial reform, singling out its creation of "a new consumer financial protection agency to set and enforce clear rules of the road."

While members of Congress take their spring break, the debate over financial reform and, most relevantly, Sen. Chris Dodd's omnibus bill simmer here in Washington. Dodd's bill has raised any number of questions -- starting, most fundamentally, with "Are you with the banks or the consumers?" -- but perhaps the most confusing debate right now is over the previously obscure issue of prudential standards. (If you're just joining this debate, read my primer on the effort so far.)

About three years ago, it looked like the United States might be emerging from its long neoconservative night to play a constructive role in ending the Israeli-Palestinian and broader Israeli-Arab conflicts. In December 2006, the Iraq Study Group, a congressionally commissioned panel of elder statesmen led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, issued a pointed rebuke of Bush administration policy in the region.

Hours before dawn on one of the last days of October 2009, the deadliest month for American troops in Afghanistan since 2001, Eric Holder, attorney general of the United States, strode out of a C-17 cargo plane parked at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. President Barack Obama, having reversed the ban on media coverage of the arrival of war dead at Dover, trailed just behind. During the official military ceremony, the two friends stood in dark suits, silently saluting 18 servicemen, including three Drug Enforcement Agency officials claimed by the Afghan War days prior.

Of all the aspirations set out by the newly inaugurated Obama administration one year ago, the promise to reduce the level of acrimony in American political life is the one that has most plainly gone unfulfilled.

American presidents have tried seven times to bring us into the community of nations that provide health care to all citizens. Seven times the effort failed. More accurately, it was blocked. In the 1940s, the anti-reform movement was led by doctors, through the American Medical Association. In the 1990s, it was led by the insurance and small-business lobbies.

New Haven, Connecticut, at the tail end of the 1970s was a pretty good place for a precocious kid to get a political education. The city contains all the ethnic and social dynamics of New York City or Philadelphia in microcosm. But it's small enough that a 15-year-old with a ten-speed could get to any neighborhood to knock on strangers' doors before an election or a primary, of which there were dozens. The city loved politics and was then embroiled in a fierce battle between "the reformers" and "the machine."

One of the greatest accomplishments of the first several months of Barack Obama's presidency has been the near-total marginalization of the Republican right. Rather than developing a coherent alternative to the president's agenda, the right has descended to frantic, tone-deaf cries of "socialism," has allowed some of the least popular figures in public life--Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich--to be their spokespeople, and most recently, seems to have staked everything on a defense of the previous administration's most disgraceful (and, incidentally, unpopular) conduct.