"Obama's Challenge": A Special BuzzFlash Book Review by Margo Baldwin, Editor and Publisher of Chesea Green

A Special BuzzFlash Book Review by Margo Baldwin, Editor and Publisher of Chesea Green

OBAMA’S CHALLENGE: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency by Robert Kuttner * $14.95 Paperback, 224 pages * Chelsea Green Publishing

Obama’s Challenge – Our Challenge: to insist on a bold progressive vision for the future that will restore the American economy and bring about a new shared prosperity.

In this urgent and important book, Robert Kuttner, who is known for his acclaimed economic journalism as well as being cofounder of The American Prospect and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos, explains what a President Obama must do to solve America’s economic crisis—the gravest since the Great Depression—and, in the process, become a truly transformative leader.

As Obama’s Challenge eloquently explains, transformative presidents have been leaders who rose to greatness in moments of extreme crisis, and who took themselves and the Republic to places that seemed impossible—Lincoln, Roosevelt, and the LBJ of the civil rights era. As Kuttner writes in Obama’s Challenge:

Now it is time for the wheel to turn again. Barack Obama has both the national moment and the raw material to be a transformative president. A 46-year-old freshman senator, an African-American no less, does not decide to pursue his party’s nomination against a universally presumed certain nominee unless he has an unerring sense of timing, confidence, and a feel for the broad stroke. Obama has exceptional skill at appealing to our better angels, and a fine capacity to be president-as-teacher. He inspires, as only a few presidents have done. But Obama will need to be a more radical president than he was a presidential candidate. Radical does not mean outside the mainstream. It means perceiving, as a leader, that radical change is necessary, discerning tacit aspirations and unmet needs in the people, and then making that radical change the mainstream view for which the people clamor.

But this will require imaginative and decisive action as Obama takes office, action bolder than he has promised during his campaign, and will be all the more difficult given the undertow of conventional wisdom in Washington and on Wall Street that resists fundamental change. Decades of regressive politics and political gridlock have left America in its most precarious situation since the onset of the Great Depression. The collapse of the housing bubble continues, as does the financial meltdown it triggered; a revival of 1970s style stagflation threatens; incomes continue to lag behind inflation; our household and international debts pile higher; disastrous climate change looms; energy and food prices continue their escalation; and the ranks of un- and under-insured Americans grow as the health insurance system unravels.
 
Facing their own great challenges, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson rallied the American people to overcome deadlocked politics in order to achieve progressive transformations—abolishing slavery, transcending economic depression, and redeeming the promise of civil rights. Each president used exceptional leadership to change the national mood, and then the national policy.
 
By appealing to what was most noble in the American spirit, these presidents energized movements for change, and in turn put pressure on themselves and on the Congress to move far beyond what was deemed conceivable. They generated accelerating momentum for far-reaching reforms that proved politically irresistible.
 
Solutions to our multiple challenges do exist, but they won’t be found in overly cautious or expedient quick fixes. With his exceptional skill at appealing to our better angels, Barack Obama could be the right leader at the right time to re-awaken America to the renewed promise of shared prosperity coupled with responsibility towards future generations and the international community with whom we share the Earth. Invoking America’s greatest leaders, Robert Kuttner explains how Obama must be a transformative president—or he risks becoming a failed one.
 
Margo Baldwin, President and Publisher
Chelsea Green Publishing

A Special BuzzFlash Book Review by Margo Baldwin, Editor and Publisher of Chesea Green 

"Obama's Challenge" at the BuzzFlash.com Progressive Marketplace.

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