Sirota describes how the party’s misplaced faith in a Solomonesque business model - take money from Wall Street donors and deliver big for them on policy, while making gestures of sympathy toward the wider base of voters - opened the door for a canny political opportunism of Donald Trump.
Meltdown not only tells that story, it connects it to the Democrats’ political present and future. Readers of mine are familiar with the gory details: reversed campaign promises, rigged bailout schemes, an absence of high-level prosecutions of financial criminals, failure of pittance-level foreclosure relief programs, toothless Dodd-Frank reform, formalization of such concepts as Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Jail, and so on, and so on. When the SS America struck an economic iceberg, the country watched Democrats fill the lifeboats with guilty bank CEOs, then waved from the horizon as everyone else went down with the ship. Though race certainly played a significant role, the deeper explanation, still taboo, is the perception that the Obama administration’s handling of the 2008 crash was both corrupt and profoundly disillusioning. To this day, the all-but-mandatory explanation for the Democrats’ 2016 disaster is a combination of racist reaction and Russian interference.
What happened over the course of the next eight years, when the dream of forever-rule evaporated and the Democrats found themselves having to explain being vanquished by a foul-mouthed game show host, is the subject of Meltdown. The demographic picture was only going to get less white going forward, leaving Republicans, as the New York Times put it on Election Night, “contemplating where they now stand in American politics.” Pundits were convinced merely competent leadership by Obama would leave Democrats with a permanent supermajority.
Conventional wisdom held that the combination of massive youth and minority turnout and Obama’s re-conquest of so-called “Reagan Democrat” districts was a knockout blow to Republicans from which they’d never recover.
#DAVID SIROTA MELTDOWN PODCAST FULL#
Obama’s “realigning” victory put his party in full control of the state, armed with a whopping 78-seat advantage in the House and a 59-41 edge in the Senate. When Barack Obama was elected on November 4th, 2008, America’s political landscape appeared altered permanently. But first, a few words about Meltdown, whose central themes I covered for nearly a decade in Rolling Stone, and in books like Griftopia and The Divide. In the interview below, you’ll hear the Useful Idiots interview of David about the series. I consulted on the project and you’ll hear my voice on several of the episodes, along with contemporary witnesses like Neil Barofsky, the former Inspector General of the TARP bailout.
#DAVID SIROTA MELTDOWN PODCAST SERIES#
The subject is one of the great taboos in modern mainstream media, which makes the sheer breadth of the series all the more satisfying: the Democratic Party’s botched response to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and the political consequences that followed. He developed it in conjunction with Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, of Taxi to the Dark Side and Client 9 fame.
Meltdown, released on Audible yesterday, is an investigative audio series that’s been an obsession of my friend David’s for years. “When this comes out, I’ll have absolutely none.” “What’s really cool is I have very few friends in DC,” says Meltdown podcast creator David Sirota.
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