These quotes were curated by Larry Lessig in his new book, Republic Lost. Here is his comment on them:

I was convinced by Obama. More than convinced: totally won over. It wasn't just that I agreed with his policies. Indeed, I didn't really agree with a bunch of his policies--he's much more of a centrist on many issues than I. It was instead because I believed that he had a vision of what was wrong with our government, and a passion and commitment to fix it... In speech after speech, Obama described the problem of Washington just as I have, though with a style that is much more compelling. It was this theme that distinguished Obama most clearly from the heir apparent to the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton. For Clinton was not running to "change the way Washington works." She stood against John Edwards and Barack Obama in their attack on the system and on lobbyists in particular. As she told an audience at YearlyKos in August 2007: "A lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans. They represent nurses, they represent social workers, yes, they represent corporations that employ a lot of people." ...Instead, Clinton's vision of the presidency was much like her husband's... She saw the job of president to be to take a political system and do as much with it as you can. It may be a lame horse. It may be an intoxicated horse. But the job is not to fix the horse. The job is to run the horse as fast as you can. Clinton had a raft of programs she promised to push through Congress. Nowhere on that list was fundamental reform of how Washington worked.

Lessig and many Obama supporters besides backed him because of that distinction. "It was my view, too, that the critical problem for the next president was the corruption we've been exploring," Lessig wrote, "not because corruption is the most important problem. But because corruption is the gateway problem: until we solve it, we won't solve any number of other critical problems."



Is Lessig's disappointment becoming easier to understand? He judged Obama against what seems to many voters like the most reasonable standard of all: what he promised to attempt if elected. It isn't Obama's failure that rankles Lessig and many others, so much as that he never tried.



As Lessig puts it:

I thought Obama got this. That's what he promised, again and again. That was "the reason [he] was running for President[--]to challenge that system." Yet Obama hasn't played the game that he promised. Instead, the game he has played has been exactly the game that Hillary Clinton promised and that Bill Clinton executed: striking a bargain with the most powerful lobbyists as a way to get a bill through--and as it turns out, the people don't have the most powerful lobbyists. As I watched this strategy unfold, I could not believe it. The idealist in me certainly could not believe that Obama would run a campaign grounded in "change" yet execute an administration that changed nothing of the "way Washington works."



But the pragmatist in me also could not believe it. I could not begin to understand how this administration thought that it would take on the most important lobbying interests in America and win without a strategy to change the power of those most important lobbying interests. Nothing close to the reform that Obama promised is possible under the current system; so if that reform was really what Obama sought, changing the system was an essential first step.



I take no position about whether Obama's "change the rules of the game" rhetoric or his "prioritize working within the system toward health care reform and stimulus" actions were the wiser course. It is enough to note that this is a subject of intense disagreement on the left, that Obama explicitly championed liberals on one side of the argument, and that having won them over, he betrayed their trust. It isn't a coincidence that one motivation for the leftists taking to the streets in cities across America is the growing conviction that working within the political system is pointless.

