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Please welcome John Podesta, former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, president of the Center for American Progress, head of the Obama transition team and author of The Power of Progress -- jh

In his new book, The Power of Progress:  How America's Progressives Can (Once Again) Save Our Economy, Our Climate, and Out Country, John Podesta notes that "it will take many years and serious leadership to reverse the disastrous outcomes of Bush's presidency."

No shit.

But should Barack Obama win the election in November and Democrats retain control of both houses -- fingers crossed, knock on wood -- Americans will be presented with an opportunity unprecedented in many of our lifetimes for seeing true progressive change in this country come about. 

The conservative ideology ushered in by Ronald Reagan that has largely guided this country since 1980 is disgraced and lies in ruins on the nightly news.  But what are we to replace it with?  What should the role of government in our lives be, and how can we restore the American dream in a rapidly changing global economy?

It's comforting to read Podesta's new book and realize that the man that Obama has tasked with leading his transition team is considering these questions quite thoughtfully.   (The leader of McCain's transition team, on the other hand, was a lobbyist for Saddam Hussein.)  Podesta chronicles the history of progressive politics in the 20th century and looks at how it addressed many of the challenges we faced as a nation, with an eye to how these lessons can be applied to the monumental hurdles which stand before us.

Progressivism, as Podesta notes, is not just a word for people afraid to call themselves liberals in a disgraced environment. While liberalism and progressivism interweave and intertwine, post- New Deal liberalism is largely identified with the Democratic party, and is associated with the rise of federal government action.  The Progressive Era -- which he dates from roughly 1900 to 1920 and identifies with the muckraking work of Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens -- started at the municipal level and developed out of non-partisan reform efforts to clean up corruption and the domination of both parties by special interests.

There's a lot to chew on in this book, which is a quick pithy read I highly recommend (you can read an excerpt here).  But given Podesta's role in transitioning from the Bush disaster in the event of an Obama victory, I was very interested in the admiration he showed for Roosevelt's first hundred days:

In the first three months of his administration -- the famous Hundred Days -- FDL signed into law fifteen major initiative to save the American economy, including the Emergency Banking Act, the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the abandonment of the gold standard, the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Securities Act, the Glass-Steagall Act (to implement banking regulation), and the National industrial Recovery Act.  Soon afterward came massive programs to expand rural electrificiation and -- through agencies such as the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration -- public works projects that set up "39,000 new schools (70 percent of all new schools built during the 1930s), 2,500 new hospitals, 325 airports, and tens of thousands of smaller projects," according to Jonathan Alter in his recent book about the Hundred Days.

Even with the courts stepping in to strike down his early New Deal legislation, Roosevelt pushed ahead with the second New Deal that included the creation of Social Security in 1935 and passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which formally recognized union organizing, collective bargaining, and strikes. Combined, FDR's actions in the 1930s solidified the aspirations of countless reformers dating back to to the late nineteenth century and set the nation on the course of government support and intervention in the economy that remains to this day (despite the attacks on this legacy by the new proponents of laissez-faire).

Podesta then goes on to address progressive solutions to an equally challenging set of circumstances during an Obama administration -- solving global warming, security and health care for American workers, a strategy of sustainable security (in which he argues, as George Soros did during his visit to the Book Salon, that "the war on terror" frame must be undone).  

So I'd like to get the discussion going by asking -- should Obama be elected, will he need to act as broadly and decisively as FDR right out of the gate?  Will he be able to?  What kind of conversations do we need to start having now about shaping our goals for the future in order to make that task easier?  And what is the best way that we as progressives can act to bring about a safe and prosperous twenty-first century?