John Nichols | The Nation

With his second inauguration, Barack Obama will become the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to renew his tenure after having won more than 51 percent of the vote in two consecutive elections.

More importantly, in a political sense, he will be the first Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to have won mandates from the majority of the American people in two consecutive elections.

This is the perspective that Americans should bring to the inaugural festivities. We should expect a great deal from Barack Obama. Despite four years of battering by Fox News and Limbaugh and the Tea Party and Mitch McConnell, he has been re-elected with a higher percentage of the popular vote than John Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bill Clinton in 1992 or 1996 or George Bush in 2000 or 2004.

Obama’s mandate extends beyond himself. His party has increased its Senate majority and Democrats earned 1.4 million more votes in House races than Republicans. Gerrymandering and money kept Republican control of the House, but that opposition party is in such disarray that the president really does have an opening to make something of his mandate.

Obama must seize that opportunity as an essential part of making the case for bold executive orders and a bold legislative agenda that will bring not just the hope but the change he promised in what now seems like a very distant 2008 campaign. The president has in the transition period since the 2012 election displayed a willingness to push harder, to go bigger, and it has yielded significant progress not just on gun-safety issues but in the long struggle against the Republican austerity agenda that makes a diety of deregulating away consumer and environmental protections, tearing the social safety net and cutting taxes for wealthy campaign donors.

To consolidate that progress, and to assure that his second term will be as visionary and activist as his 2012 campaign promised, Obama must, like FDR, use every opportunity to give voice to the agenda—not just in his inaugural address but in his February 12 (Lincoln’s Birthday) State of the Union address.

To do this, the forty-fourth president would be wise to note his electoral connection to the thirty-second, as a Democrat who after a difficult first term has earned as second term with a mandate to govern. Yes, times and circumstances are different. Obama does not have the “New Deal” Congress that Roosevelt did, but neither does he face quite the economic challenge that FDR did.

But Obama’s responsibility in 2013 is the same as Roosevelt’s in 1937: the president must turn America’s attention toward its democratic vistas. He must tell the people that not just he but they have accomplished something. And that they can accomplish much, much more in the next four years.

Roosevelt did this when he used his second inaugural address to deliver an argument for government that was, at once, bold and well-reasoned.

FDR portrayed his first term as a time of struggle “to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it; to end by action, tireless and unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day.” But he envisioned a second term in which government could become a force not merely for tempering the worst excesses of Wall Street but for making real the promise of new age.

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“Instinctively we recognized a deeper need—the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men,” Roosevelt explained.

“We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.”

“In this,” FDR concluded, “we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government.”

Roosevelt’s genius was the linking of democracy and self-governance, the reminding of Americans that through elections and government they have the master economic and political forces that would otherwise dominate them. After a 2012 election campaign that his Republican foes portrayed as a referendum on the role of government, Obama has a mandate to make government work again for the American people. His inaugural address should claim that mandate with all the passion and all the determination that FDR brought to the mission seventy-six years ago.

Immigration reform is high on Obama's second-term agenda. But, Aura Bogado asks, how much attention is the president really giving it?

America has always had media critics—from Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in 1775 to the folks at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and Media Matters for America today. And they have played a vital role in exposing the mistakes and misdeeds first of subservient newspapers and more recently of broadcast and digital news outlets.

But the media reform movement that steps from complaining about irresponsible and malicious broadcasters to actually holding them to account is a more recent phenomenon. And it is entirely reasonable to suggest that the man who initiated what we today understand as a national media reform movement is Dr. Everett C. Parker, the amazing activist who successfully challenged media complicity with the Southern segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s.

Dr. Parker wrote a new chapter in American history with the fight he led, as founding director of the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, to deny the license renewal of a powerful Southern television station that refused to cover the civil rights movement.

“Every movement has thousands of individuals, whose names we never know, forming its backbone,” recalls the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “The civil rights movement, for instance, was the product of countless individuals standing and working together throughout the South and across the country. But there are always those individuals who emerge to give a face to a movement—provide leadership, vision and moral authority. In the area of media reform, it was Rev. Dr. Everett C. Parker.”

Dr. Parker, who turns 100 on January 17, has spent the better part of a lifetime “irritating and worrying the broadcast establishment”—to quote a review of his activism published some years ago by Broadcasting magazine.

But it was a request from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that set Parker on the course that would make him “the conscience of the broadcast industry and the Federal Communications Commission.” With other religious leaders, Parker met with Dr. King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King complained that one of great challenges facing the emerging civil rights movement was the failure of Southern media outlets to cover it. Major television and radio stations, and most newspapers, were not just dismissive of or critical of the movement. They literally refused to cover it—going to far as to blur television screens and announce they were having “technical difficulties” when images of King and other civil rights campaigners appeared on the national NBC news.

One of the worst offenders was WLBT-TV, a station broadcasting out of Jackson, Mississippi.

When WLBT’s broadcast license came up for renewal, Parker and the UCC’s Office of Communications organized a challenge, arguing that WLBT was not meeting its responsibility to broadcast in the public interest on airwaves that belonged to all the people—not just white Southern segregationists. The Federal Communications Commission had the power to pull the license. But the politically appointed and politically connected commissioners bowed to pressure from still-powerful Southern interests—and a broadcast industry that was determined to fight the application of basic standards. “Talk about obstacles being thrown in the path!” recalls former FCC commissioner Michael Copps, a student of the regulatory process who has long celebrated Parker’s work. “At WLBT, many of its friends from other broadcast stations, and high-paid industry lawyers and lobbyists all swarmed the FCC and argued that ordinary people without a property interest in a station had no standing to appeal a license. And the FCC, to its shame, agreed.”

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Undaunted, Parker and his office went to great expense to collect proof of WLBT’s misdeeds—including evidence of how WLBT and other Southern stations systematically refused to cover not just the civil rights movement but any positive news regarding African-Americans—and then took the issue to court. It was a conservative jurist on the DC Circuit Court, Judge Warren Berger (later the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), who initially granted standing to Parker and his fellow petitioners and then determined that “the broadcast industry does not seem to have grasped the simple fact that a broadcast license is a public trust subject to termination for breach of duty.”

In 1969, the US Supreme Court vacated WLBT’s license on the grounds that it had violated the public trust and breached the duty that went with a broadcast license.

The decision changed the way in which Southern stations, and many Northern stations, covered news of civil rights and liberation movements. It also forced the FCC to begin taking seriously challenges to broadcast licenses. Eventually, Parker and the UCC Office of Communication would convince the FCC to accept equal opportunity provisions that began to address hiring barriers at broadcast outlets—as well as barriers to the ownership of broadcast outlets by women and people of color. It was all part of a whole for Parker, who would go on to champion the cause of the Wilmington 10, a group of young North Carolina activists who were wrongly convicted in a notorious civil rights–era prosecution. Parker would live to see outgoing North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue issue pardons of innocence in December 2012 for the nine African-American men and one white woman who received prison sentences totaling nearly 300 years as a result of trumped-up prosecutions in the 1971 case.

As Jackson and others have well recognized, Parkerʼs campaigns have never been about “abstract legal principles.” They have always been about “core principles of justice, equality and fairness.”

And when it came to broadcasting, as Jackson notes, “Dr. Parkerʼs core idea was so simple: The airwaves belong to the people, so the people should have considerable say about how theyʼre used and managed.”

That is the essential premise of the modern media-reform movement.

And Dr. Everett Parker, now 100, is a living testament to the resilience and the determination of the movement he brought into being.

John Nichols is the co-founder of Free Press, the nation’s media reform network. Read his tribute to another civil rights activist, Gerda Lerner, here.

Reince Priebus speaks at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

Fresh from claiming the GOP’s 2012 run was “a great campaign—a great nine-month campaign" that only went awry at the end, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus now wants to rig the Electoral College so that when Republicans lose they still might “win.”

Specifically, Priebus is urging Republican governors and legislators to take up what was once a fringe scheme to change the rule for distribution of Electoral College votes. Under the Priebus plan, electoral votes from battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other states that now regularly back Democrats for president would be allocated not to the statewide winner but to the winners of individual congressional districts.

Because of gerrymandering by Republican governors and legislators, and the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas and college towns, divvying up Electoral College votes based on congressional district wins would yield significantly better results for the GOP. In Wisconsin, where Democrat Barack Obama won in 2012 by a wider margin than he did nationally, the president would only have gotten half the electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, where Obama won easily, he would not have gotten the twenty electoral votes that he did; instead, under the Priebus plan, it would have been eight for Republican Mitt Romney, twelve for Barack Obama.

Nationwide, Obama won a sweeping popular-vote victory—with an almost 5-million ballot margin that made him the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to take more than 51 percent of the vote in two elections. That translated to a very comfortable 322-206 win in the Electoral College.

How would the 2012 results have changed if a Priebus plan had been in place? According to an analysis by Fair Vote-The Center for Voting and Democracy, the results would have been a dramatically closer and might even have yielded a Romney win.

Under the most commonly proposed district plan (the statewide winner gets two votes with the rest divided by congressional district) Obama would have secured the narrowest possible win: 270-268. Under more aggressive plans (including one that awards electoral votes by district and then gives the two statewide votes to the candidate who won the most districts), Romney would have won 280-258.

“If Republicans in 2011 had abused their monopoly control of state government in several key swing states and passed new laws for allocating electoral votes, the exact same votes cast in the exact same way in the 2012 election would have converted Barack Obama’s advantage of nearly five million popular votes and 126 electoral votes into a resounding Electoral College defeat,” explains FairVote’s Rob Richie.

This is something Priebus, a bare-knuckles pol who promoted a variety of voter-disenfranchisement schemes in 2012, well understands.

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The RNC chair is encouraging Republican governors and legislators—who, thanks to the “Republican wave” election of 2010, still control many battleground states that backed Obama and the Democrats in 2012—to game the system.

“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue [Democratic in presidential politics] that are fully controlled red [in the statehouse] ought to be considering,” Priebus says with regard to the schemes for distributing electoral votes by district rather than the traditional awarding of the votes of each state (except Nebraska and Maine, which have historically used narrowly defined district plans) to the winner.

Already, there are moves afoot in a number of battleground states to “fix” the rules to favor the Republicans in 2016, just as they have already fixed the district lines for electing members of the House. Thanks to gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic votes, Republicans were able to lose the overall nationwide vote for US House seats by 1.4 million votes and still take control of the chamber—thus giving the United States the divided government that voters have rejected.

There are many reforms that are needed to expand democracy in the United States. But gaming the Electoral College is not one of them.

Indeed, as Richie says, the very fact that it is possible to rewrite the rules and use gerrymandered congressional district lines to thwart the will of the people regarding the election of the president of the United States the very fact “should give us all pause.”

“The Election of the president should be a fair process where all American voters should have an equal ability to hold their president accountable,” says Richie. “It’s time for the nation to embrace one-person, one-vote elections and the ‘fair fight’ represented by a national popular vote. Let’s forever dismiss the potential of such electoral hooliganism and finally do what the overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently preferred: make every vote equal with a national popular vote for president.”

That’s the right standard for a modern nation that respects democracy.

And Reince Priebus, who was wrong about the Republicans running a “great” campaign in 2012, is even more wrong when he proposes rule changes that would allow a losing Republican candidate to “win” the presidency.

For a glimpse of more hopeful post-election GOP policy, read our latest dispatch from Voting Rights Watch.

Jack Lew testifies on Capitol Hill on February 15, 2011. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

How do we reconcile the contradictions that are inherent in Jack Lew? He's the Carleton College student whose faculty adviser was Professor Paul Wellstone and the Clinton aide who promoted trade agreements and budget policies that Senator Paul Wellstone opposed; the former aide to populist Massachusetts Congressmen Joe Moakley and Tip O’Neill who made at least $1.1. million a year as a managing director of Citigroup; and now, the man President Obama has nominated to replace Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury.

A lot of Senate Republicans think they have figured Lew out. They don’t like him. Indeed, they dismiss the veteran Clinton administration and Obama administration aide who currently serves as White House Chief of Staff as “The Man Who Cannot Say Yes to Republicans.” Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, a key Republican on budget issues, said nominating Lew for the Treasury post would be “a mistake.” Barry Johnson, House Speaker John Boehner’s former chief of staff, told Bob Woodward that the problem Republicans have with Lew is that the man who served as both Clinton and Obama’s Office of Management and Budget director was “always trying to protect the sacred cows of the left.”

There’s something to the GOP gripe: Back in 2008 and 2009, Lew fought for a big stimulus plan, and he’s got a track record of defending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that goes back to the 1980s.

Yet Lew is, as well, the steady defender of deregulation who headed Clinton’s OMB when the previous Democratic president organized the gutting of New Deal–era Glass-Steagall protections against banker adventurism. He hails from the same inner circle as Geithner and Lawrence Summers. And there was that Citigroup stint. And, while he suggests that Lew’s nomination is likely to be approved, Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, says: “He will be confirmed without my vote. At a time when the middle class is collapsing and millions of workers are unemployed, I do not believe he is the right person at the right time to serve in this important position.”

How many Democrats will join Sanders? That will be determined by the quality of questioning Lew faces, and the quality of the nominee’s responses.

Progressive Democrats, who have been justifiably frustrated with the defining role that Wall Street–aligned Clintonites have played in setting—or is it “warping”—Obama administration economic policies, do the president no favors by simply rubber-stamping Lew.

The nominee must make a case for Senate approval of his nomination. Republicans will ask plenty of tough questions. Democrats should as well.

To wit:

1. You were a special assistant to Bill Clinton when he worked with Newt Gingrich to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Your former professor Paul Wellstone opposed both agreements as a US senator, arguing that they undermined jobs, labor standards, environmental protections and democracy. Who was right? Clinton or Wellstone?

2. As Treasury secretary, you will have a big role to play in international wrangling over trade policies and complaints about Chinese currency manipulation. We’ve got record trade deficits with China and there are estimates that trade policies have cost as many as 2.8 million American jobs. Do you think that successive US administrations, several of which you have served, have been too lax when it comes to international economic relations? What have you learned from your experience of two decades as an advocate for free-trade agreements? Does the United States need to get tougher with its trading partners? Do you have any objections to Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown’s Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act?

3. You served as head of Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget when he was working with a Republican Congress to undermine the Glass-Steagall Act and to enact the Wall Street–friendly Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Progressives opposed these initiatives, warning that they erred too far on the side of deregulation. Wellstone warned that “Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.” Did you share any of those concerns or were you all on board with the deregulation push?

4. Former North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan said during the 1999 Glass-Steagall debate: “I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930’s is true in 2010.” In hindsight, considering the banking meltdown and all the economic pain that followed upon it, do you think that Dorgan might have been on to something?

5. In October 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama said: “We know that it’s because of deregulation that Wall Street was able to engage in the kind of irresponsible actions that have caused this financial crisis.” In September 2010, you told the Senate Budget Committee, “The problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation.” With regard to the financial-services industry meltdown of 2008, you said that “I don’t believe that deregulation was the proximate cause.” Who was right? Barack Obama or you?

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6. How do you reconcile your defenses of deregulation with the findings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? It’s report concluded that “more than thirty years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and actively pushed by the powerful financial industry at every turn, had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe.”

7. During George W. Bush’s presidency, you served as a managing director of CitiGroup, which paid you more than $1 million a year and gave you a $945,000 bonus just days before you joined the Obama administration (as a State Department appointee) in 2009. Is it wise to put a former banker in charge of a cabinet agency that has quite a significant role to play in debates about how the federal government might regulate, and more generally relate to, banks that are sometimes referred to as “too-big-to-fail”? As Treasury Secretary, you will head the Financial Services Oversight Council, a Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act creation that has the power to “resolve”—i.e., dissolve—“financially-dangerous” institutions such as “too-big-to-fail” banks. Watchdog groups such as Public Citizen worry that you retain “deep Wall Street connections.” Would your ties to Citigroup prevent you from dissolving Citigroup and/or similarly large financial institutions if they posed a threat to the US economy?

8. It has been reported that, while at CitiGroup, you oversaw a “unit that profited off the housing collapse and financial crisis by investing in a hedge fund king who correctly predicted the eventual sub-prime meltdown and now finds himself involved in the center of the US government’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs.” Should we be concerned about that? In hindsight, do you think your actions were appropriate? And can you assure the American people that, after your government service, you will not go back through the revolving door to work for CitiGroup or some other big bank?

9. During the transition period between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies, you are broadly credited with helping to define the scope and character of the new president’s stimulus legislation. Was the stimulus sufficient? Should we invest in additional stimulus spending?

10. Do you believe that investing in job-creation initiatives, and other steps that grow the economy, should be central to any deficit-reduction strategy? Many European countries have focused on deficit reduction as the highest priority, implementing harsh austerity programs that accept high unemployment and deep cuts in social services as a necessary consequence of budget balancing.  Many Republicans in Congress claim to embrace this approach, arguing that nothing is more important that addressing deficits and debts. What’s your take on austerity?

11. Eleven European countries, close allies and frequent economic partners of the United States, are in the process of developing and implementing financial transaction taxes. These “Robin Hood” initiatives—which impose small taxes on trades and speculation—are designed not just to raise revenues but to control against aggressive and irresponsible speculation. Your predecessor, Timothy Geithner, resisted them. Was he wrong? Should the United States implement a “Robin Hood Tax,” as recommended by unions such as National Nurses United and Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN)?

12. You have spent a lifetime moving between government and Wall Street. You have seen the intersect of money and politics. You have seen how corporations can influence the governing process. Do you think big banks and corporations have too much influence over our politics and our government? The president has suggested that it is time to consider amending the Constitution to limit the ability of banks and corporations to buy elections and define the regulatory agenda. Is he right?

For more skeletons in the closets of Obama's Cabinet nominees, read John Nichols's size-up of Chuck Hagel.