For all the promise of 'bottom up economic development,' Obamanomics has so far proved to be a hollow shell. Beneath the third-way wordplay, it signals little more than a progressively flavored form of technocratic competence. In as far as Obamanomics defines space of ideological principle, this has take the form of a series of adaptations of the mutating neoliberal order, rather than any kind of significant break with that order. For Susan Watkins, it represents 'a turn to neo-Reaganmics.' Market deference remains both a political and practical necessity shored up with warmed-over 'necessitarian' homilies about fiscal discipline, global competition, level playing fields, and races to the top. Of course, this is not to say that nothing has changed. Generally cool competence, on its own, marks an improvement on the craven incompetence of the Bush Administration, for which government failure became, in effect, a self-fulfilling vocation. But competence 'has its limits as a source of inspiration... [And] with unemployment at around 10 percent and still on an upward trajectory, the Administration is left arguing not that jobs are being created but that without Obama's policies things would be worse,' Ryan Lizza has observed-'not a very pithy slogan.' Worse still, in fact, the long-term distributive consequences of unemployment- captured in the statistic that the 'real' unemployment rate is 4 percentage points above the official rate for white workers, but 15 percentage points higher for blacks and Hispanics, and higher still for young people across the board- means that broadly-based, bottom-up growth will not occur on its own. Neither are supply-side adjustments to the education system or post hoc reforms of the tax code even remotely adequate to this deepening problem, even in the medium term. Rather, a neoliberalized mode of growth has effectively institutionalized inequality, locking in excessive gains for those at the top, while rationing extraordinarily thin pickings for those at the bottom. Real progress on jobs, like real progress on financial reform or environmental policy, means tackling the market, not tinkering with incentives or playing at the margins. As yet, nothing in the practice of Obamanomics suggests there is even a taste for such market-transforming interventions. If Obamanomics represents little more than a series of rhetorical positions, then it should come as no surprise that its transformative traction has been severely limited. Transformative change, historically speaking, is more often achieved by movements, rather than mere manifestos. Obama's presidential candidacy may in some sense have been a product of social movements, even if large parts of his broad electoral coalition were primarily repelled by the alternative on offer, and have since largely deserted him. The Obama movement seems to have been overtaken by quietude, if not by various degrees of frustration and disillusionment. Its erstwhile leader has since governed in a markedly detached fashion, holding progressive constituencies at arm's length and apparently preferring to surround himself with orthodox experts and new-age 'pragmacrats.'"
Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, writing in 2010
Peck predicting the collapse of the Obama coalition midway through his second term, and laying out the fundamentally weak position in which Obama left the democratic party
