We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/opinion/24rich.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print

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Falling Into the Chasm

By PAUL KRUGMAN

This is what happens when you need to leap over an economic chasm — but either can’t or won’t jump far enough, so that you only get part of the way across.

If Democrats do as badly as expected in next week’s elections, pundits will rush to interpret the results as a referendum on ideology. President Obama moved too far to the left, most will say, even though his actual program — a health care plan very similar to past Republican proposals, a fiscal stimulus that consisted mainly of tax cuts, help for the unemployed and aid to hard-pressed states — was more conservative than his election platform.

A few commentators will point out, with much more justice, that Mr. Obama never made a full-throated case for progressive policies, that he consistently stepped on his own message, that he was so worried about making bankers nervous that he ended up ceding populist anger to the right.

But the truth is that if the economic situation were better — if unemployment had fallen substantially over the past year — we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We would, instead, be talking about modest Democratic losses, no more than is usual in midterm elections.

The real story of this election, then, is that of an economic policy that failed to deliver. Why? Because it was greatly inadequate to the task.

When Mr. Obama took office, he inherited an economy in dire straits — more dire, it seems, than he or his top economic advisers realized. They knew that America was in the midst of a severe financial crisis. But they don’t seem to have taken on board the lesson of history, which is that major financial crises are normally followed by a protracted period of very high unemployment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/opinion/25krugman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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The realities of American politics don't change much from year to year. The "politics of division" which Obama denounced are the faithful reflection of national divisions of wealth and resources which are wider today than they have been at any time since the late 1920s.

In fact the "dream" died even before Obama was elected in November 2008. Already in September that year Senator Obama, like his opponent, Senator McCain, had voted, at the behest of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (formerly of Goldman Sachs) and of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, for the bailout of the banks. Whatever the election result, there was to be no change in the architecture of financial power in America.

Two events are scheduled for next Tuesday. If we are to believe the polls, the voters will install Republicans as the new majority in the House of Representatives. A longer shot - they may even win the Senate.

If that happens, Obama will be in exactly the situation that Bill Clinton found himself on November 9, 1994, the day after the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

Also on Tuesday, chairman Bernanke and the Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve Board will convene in Washington and decide on how much money to create – "quantitative easing" - and hand to the banks, in order to lift the country out of a Depression which has 30 million Americans either without a job, or working part-time. Their deliberations will be more consequential, at least in the short term, than the verdicts of the voters in the democratic contest.