2010 Obama Administration

No president has ever won re-election with an estranged base, because it is a president's base that fights his battles for him. Mr. President, you can get your base back and you need to. If you show you are on our side, we will be on yours.

Even with the bitter defeat of the DREAM Act, progressives need to take a moment here at the end of this tough year and celebrate the end of DADT. As MLK liked to remind us, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it curves toward justice.

The next couple of news cycles will be dominated by the deficit commission report. The way Obama reacts to this will be one of the most consequential early signs of which path the administration wants to take going forward.

Progressives need to spend less time commiserating over all the good things that Congress should do but won't, and more time thinking about the things Obama could do if he aggressively seized the reins of government.

My advice for Obama is to not wait as long as Bill Clinton did in 1994 to stand his ground on important issues. It's important to have a give-and-take, but it's also important to pick some fights.

If Democrats want to know what women want this election season, I encourage their campaign gurus to start talking about an issue that has strong consistent support from women of all ages, races, and locations: gun control.

When the foreclosures issue suddenly flared up over the last 24 hours, my heart sank. Just as regular homeowners were starting to get some legal traction to fight back against fraud and predatory lending by big banks, it seemed, some bank lobbyist had managed to sneak something through in the dead of night that would screw people over again. It was Washington at its worst. But, instead, we learned today that exposing sleazy, dead-of-night deals cut by the special interests with politicians can and does sometimes work.

The folks running the Obama political operation have always believed they could control the message and the resources of the party better than anyone else. Now embattled House and Senate candidates are paying the price.

The progressive movement fought like crazy to make this happen, Elizabeth Warren showed her usual savvy and toughness once again, and the president did the right thing.

The White House's strategy of getting credit it thinks it deserves sucks. It's not working, and whining about the fact that people don't give the administration enough credit is not going to get them to give it more.

Progressives can't ignore America's projected budget deficits. We need a proactive strategy -- focused on rebuilding a broadly prosperous economy -- to push back on the conservative deficit hawks.

What Summers, Dodd, and apparently the president continue to not get is that massive concentrations of wealth and power do equally massive amounts of damage over time to both a democracy and to the markets.

Republicans are threatening to filibuster a bill to regulate the big banks and hedge funds that trashed our economy and that would be the greatest gift they could possibly give Democrats.

Is this the change we have been looking for? Only partly. Insurers and other big corporations remain far too powerful, and we will have to keep working hard to improve health care policy in America.

The tea partiers are not the only angry people in America. Progressives who were promised change and didn't get it are getting more and more ready to take things to the streets themselves.

Along with health care and figuring out a better solution to our unemployment crisis, taking on these big banks and stripping them of their power to destroy our economy will be the defining fight of our generation.

Even as Obama has tried to take on big issues, he hasn't seemed to have grasped the need to go beyond the conventional wisdom of the Washington establishment in terms of how to get them done.

Six megabanks control assets amounting to more than 60% of the country's gross domestic product. How does our economy ever function under the weight of that kind of concentration of wealth and power? How does our democracy?

The way Barack Obama ended his State of the Union -"We don't quit. I don't quit". - has already become a rallying cry for Democrats. I have seen tha...

Progressives will get far more traction by taking on the deficit issue directly and having our own strategy than by saying it doesn't matter, or saying we'll deal with it later, and then trying to change the subject.

As important as health care reform is, it is a crushing level of unemployment that is driving the president's approval numbers, and the entire Democratic Party's political fortunes, down.

What Democrats have to get through their heads is that neither swing nor base voters will reward you for gutlessness.

Democrats have an absolutely clear path to passing a strong health care reform bill quickly: to simply pass the full Senate bill, and then pass a clean-up bill through the reconciliation process

I have complained many times about Obama not wanting to go with a populist message. Yesterday, in a proposal to impose a major new surtax on the biggest banks, he really went for it.