Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, weighed in today on the OWS mess, lest we forget the abandonment of the poor and middle-class by Barack Obama, the anti-FDR:

“One of the appalling things here is that there are so many Democratic mayors involved in these crackdowns or in Bloomberg’s case, someone who is seen as a liberal,” Ehrenreich said in a telephone interview. “And where in all this was Obama? Why couldn’t he have picked up the phone at some point a couple of weeks ago and called the mayors of Portland and Oakland and said: ‘go easy on these people. They represent the anger and aspirations of the majority.’ Would that have been so difficult…?”

… For years, [Ehrenreich] said, she had maintained the importance of going out to vote. Now, she suggested she was becoming sympathetic to the argument of some of the protesters that the political system was so corrupted that elections were irrelevant.

“I am a responsible citizen. I always tend to drag myself out to vote but I am having trouble making arguments for that. I find myself having a lot of trouble,” she said. “We do not seem to be heard or represented.”

She added: “I just feel so disgusted at this point.”

For all her anger, though, Ehrenreich said she remained confident that the evictions were not the last for the movement.