In a Bloggingheads video excerpted by the New York Times, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Mark Schmitt tackles an important question with James Pinkerton of Fox News: Did Obama save capitalism? Mark's simple answer is yes, "and everybody ought to just bow down about that, particularly people on Wall Street." But perhaps it wasn't quite the same thing as what FDR did after the Great Depression. "It's not like you have an alternative waiting in the wings," i.e. socialism or fascism, "which to a greater degree there was during the time of FDR," he says.
More specifically, Obama "saved the financial sector and he saved the auto sector," Mark points out, and our economy doesn't have much left if you let those two collapse. But the White House hasn't done everything right -- "the range of people they're listening to and the ways they're thinking about the economy should be broader," he notes. There are some problems that are out of their hands to some extent, like outsourcing and globalization. But "unless you have a way to explain to people what they're going through and how it can change and how we can get back to having more of a middle class country... then I think you've got a very tough political problem as you move into a more prosperous period," Mark concludes.
Watch the full Bloggingheads episode below, covering topics such as Obama's Trumanesque election strategy, the GOP field, and the similarities between ObamaCare and RyanCare: