Obama and the "Establishment"

Reihan Salam maybe on to something here:

The Establishment—the academic and policy elite, Wall Street, famous sexy people—are more invested in Obama than they’ve been in any president in decades. If Obama fails, a whole system will go down with him.

It seems quite an irony that the "Establishment" depends on this administration to succeed in its ventures. Which is also the reason the anti-Establishment left is trying hard to contain its disappointment with Obama (like this one).

Salam has forgotten to include the military in his list. Obama's Iraq policies, and the escalation in AfPak, are definitely way more in sync with the "Establishment" than otherwise.
The academics .... well, we are a bunch of people with highly inflated opinions of our importance in society!

Salam notes that:

You might say that President Obama has the distinct misfortune of having taken office a few years too early.

When FDR took office in 1933, the economy had already been in a spiral of decline for years, and his first term saw a fairly dramatic fall in the unemployment rate. There’s no doubt that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies helped generate jobs, yet it’s not clear that his policies would have worked as well right after the Crash. And Obama isn’t taking office in 1933. Rather, he’s taking office in 1929, right after another massive financial collapse. Chances are that the sharp increase in unemployment has just begun.

In January, when Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent and it has increased in the two months since. Few observers doubt that the unemployment rate will soon reach double digits, and there’s reason to believe that it won’t stop there.

Here, I think I have very little to disagree with Salam.