Portside

Obama needs to do something that doesn't come easily to him. He needs to demolish the previous terms of debate, some of them partly of his own making - he needs to disavow earlier mistaken policies that he embraced. Otherwise he will preside over the worst eight-year economic record of any Democratic president, and the steepest rate of decline in social spending. He will leave an economy even more unequal than he inherited. He needs to find the audacity to restore hope

Recent events have begun to cause labor activists to seriously consider if a hamstrung NLRB, and emboldened employers, could potentially inspire some unions to push the limits of labor law to try alternative means that are outside the law or if they can and should borrow the strategies used by the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to expand civil rights.