I keep hearing the White House staff describe the president as a pragmatist. David Axelrod, a chief adviser whom I admire enormously, recently called him a "ruthless pragmatist." Soon, I expect, he’ll be called a "take-no-prisoners pragmatist," or perhaps a "remorseless, merciless, and unrelenting pragmatist."
I'm relieved the president is a pragmatist, but that doesn't let him or anyone around him off the hook for describing what he wants to achieve and why. Being a pragmatist is a statement about means, not ends. It describes someone who chooses the most practical way of achieving a certain goal but it does not explain why he chooses one goal over another.
Obama seems to me especially thoughtful and passionate about one of the great moral questions of domestic policy today: widening inequality of income and wealth, and therefore of opportunity and political power. As I’ve noted before, as recently as 1980, the richest 1 percent of Americans took home about 9 percent of total national income. But since, income has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. By 2007, the richest 1 percent took home 22 percent of total national income.
This trend cannot be sustained, either morally, economically, or politically. That's why, I believe, the president has recently criticized the heads of Wall Street banks who continue to take home seven-figure incomes even as taxpayers bail them out; giant companies that shelter their income in places like Bermuda or the British Virgin Islands, the rich who say they need huge tax deductions in order to continue making charitable contributions, and other forms of unwarranted privilege in our society. All of this as millions of Americans are losing their jobs, their savings, and their homes.
To call his stance "pragmatic" is to rob it of its moral authority.
More after the jump.
--Robert Reich
