"We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too—he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician.

"If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you—the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it.

"From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.

"Lieberman—who, as you know, was and is a war lover—was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.

"It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.

"I had a teacher at Columbia University named Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The American Political Tradition, and in it, he examined presidents from the Founding Fathers down through Franklin Roosevelt. There were liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And there were differences between them. But he found that the so-called liberals were not as liberal as people thought—and that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives, and between Republicans and Democrats, was not a polar difference. There was a common thread that ran through all American history, and all of the presidents—Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative—followed this thread.

"The thread consisted of two elements: one, nationalism; and two, capitalism. And Obama is not yet free of that powerful double heritage.

"We can see it in the policies that have been enunciated so far, even though he’s been in office only a short time.

"Some people might say, 'Well, what do you expect?'

"And the answer is that we expect a lot.

"People say, 'What, are you a dreamer?'

"And the answer is, yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.

"We better hold on to that dream—because if we don’t, we’ll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don’t want. 

"What’s required is a total turn around. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That’s what we need.

"This is a vision we have to keep alive. We shouldn’t be easily satisfied and say, “Oh well, give him a break. Obama deserves respect.”

"But you don’t respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.

"The government has to represent the people’s needs. The government can’t give the job of representing the people’s needs to corporations and the banks, because they don’t care about the people’s needs. They only care about profit.