Obama's Challenge: Does He Match Up to Truly Great Leaders?

I began reading Robert Kuttner's latest book, Obama's Challenge, three weeks ago. Then, amid the last two weeks' pandemonium -- the plummeting stock market, the huge banks tumbling toward death -- I put it aside. I finished it over the weekend. My timing was soberingly ironic.

As I turned the final pages of Obama's Challenge, Congressional leadership was cinching a deal on a $700 billion bailout plan for the country's wealthiest financial institutions -- a plan that wallowed universes away from the innovative proposals put forward in Kuttner's book. Where Kuttner challenges Obama to utilize deficit spending to finance job-training programs, living wages, public works initiatives and -- eventually -- universal health care, the bailout plan would bypass low-income Americans. While Kuttner asks Obama to dip into debt to get Americans back on their feet from the bottom up, the bill cobbled together by Paulson and Congress would dip even deeper into the deficit in order to, for the most part, prop up the very top.

Obama's Challenge warns against doom-mongering fiscal conservatives who'd block far-reaching programs, prioritizing "virtuous" frugality over regular Americans' basic needs. In the face of Paulson's $700 billion request, those fiscal conservatives did rear their shaking heads -- though this time in opposition to a plan that would neglect regular Americans in favor of Wall Street.

The bill failed in the House initially, but not primarily due to progressive Democrats backing a Kuttner-like alternative. It failed because of hard-line conservatives, the folks who would no doubt raise a ruckus if a President Obama started getting all New-Deal-y after inauguration.

The creation of, and response to, the bailout plan showcase some of the barriers an economic change-seeker would face in today's political climate. However, those barriers are no match for the "transformative presidency" Kuttner has in mind for Obama.

The book begins by asking readers to take two leaps of faith. One: Obama will be the next president. Two: Obama, despite his driftings toward the center-right in recent months, has the imagination, the heart and the know-how to steer the nation in a wholly new political direction.

These leaps may seem unduly risky. During my first hour of reading, I couldn't turn off the whiny little voice in my head, squeaking, "Don't get your hopes up! Don't get your hopes up!" Kuttner himself calls his assumption of an Obama victory a "slightly cheeky exercise." But he also shows that it's a highly useful one. Only by mentally catapulting Obama into the White House can we fully address the question of what he should do when he gets there.

Also, Kuttner demonstrates that Obama does in fact have the potential to initiate Roosevelt-like reform. At one point, by piecing together excerpts from several of Obama's speeches and writings, Kuttner constructs a sample speech on the economy that praises the capacity of expansive government to serve its citizens, rejects the Republican infatuation with tax cuts for the wealthy and proposes broad new investments in public education, scientific research, jobs programs and renewable technologies. Kuttner notes that, using the same process, he could have constructed a speech full of conciliatory, "bipartisan" rhetoric and overly cautious proposals.

"Those who become excited about a particular candidate are at grave risk of getting their hearts broken," he writes, noting that his book is intended as a "sober counterweight to a lot of bad advice [Obama] will receive to govern as a post-partisan, pragmatic centrist."But at heart, Kuttner says, Obama seems more a "principled idealist than a cynic." That idealism sets him apart from the triangulation and weak standards that have marked the last two Democratic administrations. Unlike Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, according to Kuttner, Obama has all the makings of a "great president," should he have the true audacity to undertake that goal.