新闻周刊:拜登总统会否重蹈奥巴马的覆辙?(2)（在线收听）

Through it all, Obama enjoyed the adoration of liberal voters and the acquiescence of congressional progressives, who often refrained from a confrontation with the Democratic White House even when Obama's administration was steamrolling their agenda.

通过这一切，奥巴马享受着自由选民的崇拜和国会进步人士的默许，甚至在奥巴马政府热火朝天地推行他们的议程时，他们会避免与民主党白宫对抗。

In constantly seeking common ground with the GOP, Obama may have expected some friendship in return. Instead, they gave him few congressional votes and offered even fewer words of praise. Then they delivered a midterm shellacking that effectively ended the possibility of transformational change.

在不断与共和党求同的过程中，奥巴马可能期望得到一些友谊作为回报。相反，国会共和党很少投票支持奥巴马，对他的赞扬更是少之又少。共和党随后又进行了一次中期大扫除，有效地结束了转型变革的可能性。

Obama would later write that he avoided a crackdown on Wall Street because that might have "required a violence to the social order."

奥巴马后来写道，他没有对华尔街进行镇压，因为这可能“需要对社会秩序施加暴力”

That reverence for the status quo—and deference to Wall Street after the financial crisis and housing meltdown—ultimately helped create the backlash conditions for the rise of Trump. One data point suggested a direct linkage: In one-third of the counties that flipped from Obama to Donald Trump, there had been an increase in the number of residents whose home mortgages were underwater in 2016, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.

这种对现状的敬畏——即在金融危机和房地产崩盘后对华尔街的尊重——最终构成了特朗普崛起的反冲条件。一个数据点表明了一种直接的联系：根据美国进步中心的一项研究，从支持奥巴马到倒戈特朗普的三分之一的县中，2016年住房抵押贷款处于水下的居民人数有所增加。

"We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class," University of California-Irvine professor Bernard Grofman recently told the New York Times." "Obama responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama."

加州大学欧文分校教授伯纳德·格罗夫曼最近对《纽约时报》表示：“如果民主党仍然是工人阶级的政党，我们就不会让特朗普担任总统”。“为应对房地产危机，奥巴马选择救助贷款机构和相关金融机构，而没有救助那些失去家园的人。而在奥巴马执政期间，收入分配中处于中间和最底层的人的工资和收入停滞不前。”

"We should be investing in deficit spending"

“我们应该投资于赤字开支”

A decade later, it's unclear what Biden gleaned from his experience with Obama.

十年后，拜登从与奥巴马的共事中得到了什么尚不清楚。

At some moments, he appears to finally be leaning away from his decades-long record as a budget-cutting fiscal hawk, instead campaigning to expand Social Security, then embracing the idea of $2,000 stimulus checks and most recently declaring that "we should be investing in deficit spending in order to generate economic growth."

在某些时候，拜登似乎终于不再充当数十年来一直担任的削减预算的财政鹰，转而致力于扩大社会保障，然后接受2000美元刺激支票的想法，最近他还宣布“我们应该投资赤字支出，以促进经济增长”

And yet at other moments he has done the opposite. He initially urged Democratic lawmakers to accept a stimulus plan with no stimulus checks. And tellingly, eight days after a violent right-wing uprising at the U.S. Capitol had eviscerated the GOP, he resuscitated and rewarded the party by signaling that—even though he needs no Republican votes—he would rather cut a deal with them on his first stimulus legislation than use ruthless legislative tactics to pass a more robust bill with only Democratic support.

但在其他时候，拜登却做了相反的事情。他最初敦促民主党议员在不进行刺激检查的情况下接受刺激计划。值得一提的是，在美国国会发生右翼暴动重创共和党的八天后，他重新振作起来，并向共和党发出信号，表示尽管他不需要共和党人的投票，但他还是希望与共和党就其第一次提出的经济刺激法案达成协议，他不愿使用残酷的立法策略，即在只有民主支持的情况下通过一项更强有力的法案。

This version of Biden mutes the calls for bold action and reflexively praises the GOP. He has asserted that once Trump is gone Republican leaders would have an "epiphany" and suddenly learn to work together with Democrats. He has also reportedly suggested he is not interested in investigating the outrages of the Trump administration; he has continued to say "we need a Republican Party" and he recently promised that "I'll never publicly embarrass" GOP lawmakers.

此时的拜登不再出声呼吁大胆行动，也没有本能地赞扬共和党。他曾断言，一旦特朗普下台，共和党领导人就会“顿悟”，突然学会与民主党合作。据报道，他还暗示自己对调查特朗普政府的暴行不感兴趣；他继续说道“我们需要共和党”，他最近承诺“我永远不会公开让共和党议员难堪”。