Written by Thomas Magstadt   

President Obama: As you are probably aware, there's a lot of talk about whether you can win a second term given the gridlock in Washington, the widespread joblessness affecting millions of American families, the depressed housing market, and the list goes on. Many of your ardent supporters in the 2008 campaign are disillusioned with Democrats in Congress and disappointed with you, in particular. As chief executive, you've acted as if you never heard of the Cinderella candidate who galvanized a nation that had stopped believing in the possibility of working within the system to bring about real change with the simple slogan, "Yes we can!"

Heaven knows, we need real change after three decades during which the "greed is good" philosophy of Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist has led to a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth, placed the onus of paying for profligate military spending, tax cuts for the wealthy, subsidies for giant state-dependent corporations, and bailouts for banks "too big to fail" on the middle class, and cut programs aimed at helping the poor.

As you know, 37 giant corporations including General Electric, Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, and Verizon paid zero taxes in 2010. Obviously, if everybody could dodge taxes the way GE and the other corporate giants do, the US would soon be in the same shape as Greece.

The 35% maximum corporate income tax is a sick joke, Mr. President, and you know it. A cynical Congress has set up a smokescreen for a system of stealth socialism created by and for the only "people" with a voice in Washington, namely giant corporations.

You probably recall how Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney, who desperately wants your job, put down a heckler at the Iowa State Fair, declaring "corporations are people, my friend." Many of your supporters want you to use the bully pulpit we gave you to give voice to the 99% who reject that absurdity and see it for what it is - an excuse for allowing corporations and wealthy individuals to finance political campaigns, thus giving us the best government money can buy.

You know, too, that according to Senator Bernie Sanders, "the Federal Reserve provided a jaw-dropping $16 trillion in total financial assistance to every major financial institution in the country as well as a number of corporations, wealthy individuals and central banks throughout the world" following the 2008 banking crisis they themselves caused. You also know that the top 1% doubled their income in the three decades since the Reagan Revolution was launched and that the average inflation-adjusted after-tax income of this plutocratic elite increased by 275% according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Finally, you know that the income security of tens of millions of middle class Americans who alone can generate the demand necessary to sustain a market economy has severely eroded and that the US now has the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country. We now have the widest gap between the rich and the rest of us since 1928. That was a prelude to the Great Depression.

Despite all, Mr. President, most of us still support you. Most of us want to believe that you want what we want. Here is a short list of things we want you to accomplish in a second term:

1. re-institute a progressive income tax and do away with loopholes that only benefit the rich

2. provide affordable universal health insurance

3. break up banks and corporations that are "too big to fail"

4. protect the environment from the depredations of an energy industry that has proven time and time again that it cares only about profits, not about building a sustainable world

5. fix the corrupt system of campaign financing that makes a mockery of our elections in the eyes of the world and undermines popular faith in representative democracy

Of course, first you have to get re-elected, which is where Hillary Clinton comes in.

Were it not for the intransigent opposition of right-wing Republican extremists in Congress, you would probably have moved to address the aforementioned structural distortions and endemic inequities in this country in your first term. But you didn't.

We want you to have a second chance, but you will need all the help you can get. You will need to find a political backbone, the kind of backbone you won't get from Joe Biden. Not because Joe Biden doesn't have a backbone or because Joe Biden hasn't been a good and faithful vice president, but because Joe Biden is no Hillary Clinton. Nobody else has the kind of clout she does among true progressives, liberals, and independents.

And don't forget us, Mr. President. You will need us.

We implore you to put Hillary Clinton on the ticket and to announce that she and Joe Biden will be switching roles in the next Obama Administration. Biden will make a fine Secretary of State and Hillary Clinton will be in a position both to help you accomplish in a second administration all the things you failed to do in the first and to continue the good work you will have started when she is elected president in her own right in 2016.


NOTE: My next post will propose a fantasy cabinet for Obama's second term. Readers are invited to make suggestions in the form of comments on this article.