'Obamanomics: How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics' by John R. Talbott
BOOK REVIEW
AMONG THE things I admire most about Barack Obama is the way that he's able, without sounding wishy-washy, to capture issues in their full complexity -- to explain them not in the obtuse terms typical of so many politicians but in a manner that recognizes nuance, that allows for shades of gray.
It's too bad that the same can't be said of John R. Talbott's "Obamanomics: How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics." Instead, much of it presents an overly simple, cartoonish view of the world.
Trumpeting any politician's platform while he's still out on the campaign trail can be perilous. Still, I had high hopes for this book, thinking that Talbott would provide some valuable context to the senator's call to restore a better sense of balance between "self-interest and community, markets and democracy." There is no doubt, after all, that something is terribly out of whack for millions of hard-working Americans who've seen their wages largely stagnate and their health and retirement benefits erode over the last 35 years.
I'd anticipated that Talbott would explore the history of these struggles -- the way that Robert B. Reich does so cogently in "Supercapitalism" or my former colleague Peter Gosselin, The Times' national economics correspondent, does so compellingly in "High Wire" -- and then link how we got here with Obama's plans for leading us to a better place.
I had figured too that Talbott might serve up an astute, if tendentious, analysis of Obama's blueprint for change. Take, for instance, healthcare. Can we really achieve meaningful reform without a government mandate for every individual to obtain medical insurance? (Obama would require only children to have coverage and employers to offer health benefits or toss money into a public pot.) Can Obama actually garner the huge savings he claims -- $2,500 per family per year -- through the use of electronic health records and other means? (Many experts are skeptical.)
Yet Talbott addresses none of these pertinent questions, delivering little more than a cut-and-paste job from the candidate's website interspersed with a slew of shallow (and sometimes silly) generalities. Talbott tells us how Obama is bent on expanding opportunity for people, how he's poised to give "the average American" a shot at "a fair wage, with the chance for personal growth and advancement and the ability to give his children a superior education." It's Obama, he says, who can return "decency, honesty, and justice to Washington." Amen to all that. But Talbott doesn't go much deeper, giving many parts of "Obamanomics" the feel of a quick-and-dirty blog entry, with snippets of Obama's speeches and writings tucked among the author's trite ramblings. ("We are our brother's keepers. We are our sister's keepers. No man is an island.")
