Galbraith on why the Democrats lost the Election

The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.

James K. Galbraith, professor of economics, offers his summation on why the Obama administration and the Democrats in congress, failed to obtain better results in last week's election.

A few commentators, like Kevin Drum over at MotherJones.com, do not believe that even if Obama had pursued a strategy where the economy was this Administration's central objective, that the Democrats would be substantially better off.  Given the people who Obama sought consul from, it seems entirely correct to me that the Democrats would still have lost the house of representatives to the Republicans with such a strategy.  

As a corollary to Drum et al's sentiment, Galbraith elaborates in his opinion piece that Obama upon entering office had a limited understanding of economics, and coupled with a desire to pursue a centrist-right policy that maintained the status quo as much as possible, through the appointment of Clinton leftovers and Wall Street yes-men,  he essentially abdicated the mantel of being an agent of change and became an enabler of of Wall Street's mismanagement.

The obvious conclusion is that if Obama had pursued, as soon as he arrived in office, a bank nationalization program or something more similar to what the British engaged in and what the Swedes did in the early 1990's, he would have been able to dismantle the banking-congressional lobbyist nexus and create national banks capable of effectively lending money to both businesses and the American public a short time after.  Make no doubt that the process would have been bloody, but through inflicting maximum pain on the management and shareholders of the corrupt banks and insurance companies -something that was universally desired by the American public- Obama would have consolidated his record of being a giant-killer and a vanguard for the "little guy."

Instead, the timid and frustratingly feeble performance of Mr. Obama and his pro-business acolytes in the White House, have left his administration and the Democrats vulnerable to attacks from multiple fronts and potentially dead in the water for the next two years.