Obama Wants To Overhaul The Bankruptcy Bill

There's obviously a lot of noise about Barack Obama's "shift to the center" inside the blogosphere, and today it bubbles up into the mainstream. The LA Times thinks that most Democrats don't care (based on nothing but anecdotes from insiders), while the Washington Post thinks his ideology is problematic, saying that liberals are calling him a centrist and Republicans are calling him a liberal, so who knows???

I think these kind of thumbsucker pieces offer little in the way of identifiable information. Then again, so does the blogosphere, increasingly. That herd mentality we've all noticed in the traditional media has definitely migrated over, and the narrative has definitely hardened. There is perhaps no bigger critic of Obama's vote on the FISA bill than I. I have been indirectly and, often, directly warned that I'm wasting energy and hurting efforts to elect him. At the same time, I can't believe that this wasn't a far bigger story, particularly in the blogosphere.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama proposed overhauling bankruptcy laws on Tuesday to ease the impact on people unable to pay their bills because of medical expenses or military service.

Obama, an Illinois senator, took aim at a 2005 overhaul of bankruptcy laws, which was strongly supported by credit card companies and other consumer lenders, that made it tougher for people facing personal bankruptcy to discharge debt.

"I'll reform our bankruptcy laws to give Americans who find themselves trapped in debt a second chance," Obama said at a town hall event in Powder Springs, Georgia, outside of Atlanta.

"While Americans should pay what they owe and we should be fair to those creditors who were fair to their borrowers, we also have to do more for the struggling families who need help the most," he added [...]

In addition, he would make it easier for people over 62 to keep their homes if they are facing bankruptcy and give some relief to people burdened by bills because of a natural disaster.

OK, I don't know if any of you remember, but the 2005 bankruptcy bill was kind of a big deal. Much like FISA, it had no public constituency, was written largely by lobbyists (this time in the credit card and banking industries), and it was an unnecessary ripping of the social safety net at a time when rising health care costs were bankrupting increasing numbers of people. Now, with the mortgage crisis and higher prices on commodities, that number is increasing. Personal bankruptcy filings were up 30% in the first six months of 2007. Paul Krugman called it the beginnings of the debt peonage society, a major advance in the privatization of risk that has contributed to the stratification of income inequality. Free Republic was against it at the time. So was Glenn Reynolds. Joe Biden received the moniker (D-MBNA) for his efforts shepherding through the bill, and it's why he was hated throughout the blogosphere from 2005-2008. This was one of the major betrayals of the last decade, and it loomed large in the creation of the larger blogosphere.

Now Barack Obama becomes one of the only Senators ever to even talk about reforming the bill, and... CRICKETS?

Really?

FISA is terribly important, because core Constitutional rights cannot be trampled upon in a supposedly free society. But the heinous bankruptcy bill is also important, and while not diminishing the importance of the 4th Amendment, it's more visceral to people's lives. People who are finding it impossible to pay their bills, whether because of a catastrophic health issue (1/2 of all personal bankruptcies) or a bad mortgage or an extended stop-loss in Iraq, have almost no recourse but to climb on an endless treadmill of payments to their creditors. We have locked in place a permanent underclass of people working for their debt. Now we have a Presidential candidate making the repeal of this nonsense a plank of his agenda.

I don't know if I'd go as far as Nathan Newman and call Obama a populist, but he makes a pretty compelling argument.

We've been seeing in the blogs and otherwise a lot of beating up on Obama for "moving to the center", which is odd statement about a candidate who in the last few weeks has:

• Come out against the California gay marriage amendment
• Promoted details of a tax plan which would taxes for the working poor and middle class by thousands of dollars each, while massively increasing taxes on the wealthy
• Condemned bad trade deals, enough to raise the ire of the news pages of the Wall Street Journal (which under Murdoch are morphing into as rightwing as the old editorial pages) which characterized his stance as "likely to rile allies."
• And just yesterday called for overhaul of the 2005 bankruptcy bill and denounced McCain for his support of the bill and the banking industry "at the expense of hardworking Americans.''

This is all pretty straight up populist positioning, something I argued Obama should have done more of in the primary earlier, which might have shortened that race considerably, something I think David Sirota would probably agree on in thinking about the economic anger rising across the country.

You can absolutely say that this is Obama's fault, that he is offering conflicting messages and not doing the necessary outreach to reassure his supporters. Of course, he did directly address those who see a "move to the center" in his recent statements, and while I didn't like the entirety of his remarks, he did self-identify as a progressive.

I think there's a lot of merit to the dissent against some of his recent moves, particularly on FISA and his rhetorical sellout to the far right by bringing up mental illness and late-term abortion practices. But there has to be a balance. There's a tunnel vision in the blogs right now, a real sense that everyone is wedded to the "betrayal" narrative with respect to Obama. I can understand why, in this age of Democratic betrayal, people would think that. But if you can recognize those places where Obama has fallen down, you can also recognize those where he stood up, in fact taller than any leading Democrat, on an issue that was part of the progressive core not but three years ago.

I'm not going to like everything Obama does (if he's truly abandoning coordinated campaigns, that's a problem, although I've heard there's less there than meets the eye), and I won't stop putting pressure on him to enact a progressive agenda that meets with my values. But I'm also not going to refuse to acknowledge those places where Obama is being bold, and I'm going to reward him for that. It's this little thing called intellectual honesty that I can't seem to get away from.