In 1992 a political nobody, a businessman named Ross Perot, appeared on a cable TV Show, “Larry Kings Live” that relatively few people watched and most Americans didn’t even know existed, and announced he was running for President of the United States.
Perot the candidate had a snippy personality. He was also an unappealing public speaker who used a school marm pointer to illustrate his major ideas. Nonetheless, he briefly led in the presidential polls, was on the stage with the two major party candidates during the big pre-election TV debates, and managed to get on the ballot of most states without spending all that much of his own very considerable wealth.
How did he he achieve all this? Simple. He merely was smart enough to realize that both candidates from the major parties, Bill Clinton and George Bush (The First), were not especially popular and not trusted by much of the electorate. He also realized that there was something all the “experts” said was good for the country, free trade, that had the effect of shipping jobs abroad, and this policy was deeply unpopular. Perot had the smarts and the guts to oppose this policy in a very public way.
Fast forward to the present. Every poll shows that Americans are deeply troubled about the direction of the country. President Obama’s own popularity is tumbling, even among his party’s core voters. The Republican Party is even more unpopular and not trusted, and its likely presidential contenders are so lackluster and/or out of the mainstream, that even a casino developer and host of what may well be television’s most inane show, a man whose prime issue to date involves another man’s birth certificate, can lead this undistinguished pack.
So this is what I’m wondering. Why hasn’t a plausible and genuinely progressive alternative to Obama and the likely Republican candidate appeared? Someone who doesn’t just play that old and rather hackneyed “soak the rich” card, but who identifies the true villain in this country’s economic malaise — Wall Street.
It’s an honest and honorable issue. Wall Street has lost its way badly over the years and no longer does what it’s supposed to do — allocate other people’s money (our money) in ways that enrich society as a whole instead of Wall Streeters themselves; allocate this vast pool of capital in ways that generate good jobs, invest in the infrastructure that builds a prosperous future, and make this country more competitive in things other than intrinsically harmful investment products.
A progressive candidate would not just rail against the ongoing flow of so much national wealth to the top at the expense of the rest but identify the enabler of this flow — Wall Street. This target would resonate with Tea Party populists as well as those on the other end of the political spectrum, and with a very large number of unaffiliated voters who see through the Washington “expert” view that Wall Street must thrive at all costs, no matter what happens to the rest of society.
Such a pitch from a progressive candidate would very quickly reset the national debate. And it would do something else that really has to be done and done very soon. Save Wall Street from itself, and restore American capitalism to its deservedly honored role as creator and protector of the largest and most productive middle class society in the history of the world.
More from this writer at http://blog.wallstreetpoet.com