What a strange story. The Daily Beast is reporting on a supposed trend among the intelligensia — a turning away from Obama by the “elites.” Look closely at the list of sources in the story and you’ll discover an interesting commonality: Aside from Ariana Huffington, all of the “elites” mentioned are center-right or right-wing in their economic outlook, deficit hawks who view social programs as creating “negative incentives.” This may be Barack Obama’s natural habitat, but it also is a collection of people who a) are more concerned with protecting capital than with the well-being of average, working people, b) view workers as raw materials, no different than steel or plastic, and c) have been consistently wrong about the economic twists and turns that ultimately resulted in the current deep funk. They didn’t just miss the housing bubble — and the tech bubble before it — but actively dismissed any notion that housing prices were unsustainable.
My hope would be that Obama will take this abandonment by his base and move in a more progressive direction; it is a pipe dream, of course.
The reality is that the president is a “centrist,” which in mainstream political parlance means he follows the conventional wisdom expressed by television talking heads and the editorial page of The Washington Post. Rather than crack down on our corporate overlords, smash the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes, end our foreign adventures and make major investments in green infrastructure (our needs dwarf the money he has committed so far) and job creation, he is talking about the deficit and entitlement reform.
Should we have expected anything different? No. The signs have always been there, explained clearly in his book The Audacity of Hope and in his legislative career. His conflation of the concepts of partisanism and ideology/philosophy, his near-religious commitment to conciliatory bipartisanship, his appointments down the line — not just Lawrence Summers, Ken Salazar, Tim Geithner and others, but his retention of Robert Gates and Ben Bernanke — and his freezing out from the health-care debate of single-payer advocates were all indications that hope and change were going to be little more than slogans.
Obama, like Clinton before him, has quieted liberals, while continuing the corporate project that has been underway in the United States since World War II and the smashing of any real labor-left in this country.
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Hank Kalet 
Unionization in this country is down to about 12% of the work force. Unions are regularly demonized, slimed and swift boated by the media and especially by the right wing monsters. The Wal-Martization of the US is moving along swimmingly. We need a strong vibrant union movement to even the playing field. Christie is hell bent to destroy the teacher unions and the Democrats are no longer a dependable ally of labor (since the rely so much on corporate money for their campaigns, for their existence).