For positive change in the issues that affect our daily lives – not only food but also jobs, income, housing – we need active political leadership. But until President Barack Obama is pushed more strongly by the left, the coming presidential election represents a choice between a full-fledged attack on government services and a continuing slide into the gloomy and depressing world of austerity economics. That's a real choice, but it's not a happy one.

When Obama has been pressured on issues, like gay rights, immigration and the Keystone XL pipeline, he has responded positively. But he hasn't been pushed on food and as a result has not followed up on campaign promises like his vow to label foods containing genetically modified ingredients, nor has he used his bully pulpit to try to protect food stamps from the ravages of Congress. Since there isn't a real food movement – yet! – progressives haven't made Obama do much.

At least he won't dismantle government, as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would. Ryan's anti-stimulus plan is an unemployment-boosting scheme that would finance the military at a high level, the social safety net at the lowest possible level – Ryan is calling for a 17 percent cut in food stamps, enough to elicit criticisms from a pair of high-ranking Catholic bishops, for example – and just about nothing else. It benefits no one but the super-rich and their representatives.

Not that that's anything new. Most people – call them working class, middle class or the 99 percent – have less money than they did a generation ago; the super-rich have scads more. A vast majority of Americans are on the losing side of the class war, as evidenced by lower pay scales, eviscerated unions, fewer benefits, later retirement, shortened or eliminated vacations, starved municipalities, and of course the quality of our food and the impact it has on us and the environment.

Obama has seen more power and money arrayed against him than perhaps any other Democrat ever. But his lack of a workable plan for economic recovery and his right-leaning stances on fiscal responsibility and debt reduction remind us that the basic problem is not one of "progressive" Democrats versus "conservative" Republicans.

This isn't new either: In the past 40 years we've witnessed a steady move to the right, which Democrats occasionally whine about, protest and even fight, but in which they've been mostly complicit.

Unless you reduce defense budgets whenever you cut taxes, you starve social programs and infrastructure, thus undermining the legitimate and beneficial role of government. Even "progressive" Democrats are onboard with some cuts to food stamps in the as-yet-unpassed farm bill.

With government providing fewer services, it becomes easy to persuade people that it's an albatross, so why not cut taxes further? Enter Paul Ryan.

Candidate Obama led us to believe that he was a different kind of Democrat, and he stirred new and even skeptical old voters. Yet he's disappointed many supporters. You can argue that his hands have been tied: Money is power – Citizens United has made this even more so – and until there's meaningful electoral and campaign-finance reform, along with real limits on lobbying, there's no chance for real progress.

Obama didn't create this system; he's a product of it. A fundamental problem now is that the right has devised both a strategy and a movement, and the left has done neither.

"All the bold answers are only from one side," Van Jones, author of "Rebuild the Dream," told me. "But we have to stop acting like there's one person with agency in America, whose name is Obama. It's not what he should do – it's what we should do."

That's right. Only by building real movements around food and other important issues can we pressure Obama (or even Romney; just look at the inroads the right made with a Democrat in office) to act in the interests of the great majority. A strategy for this is neatly outlined in the just-published paper "Prosperity Economics" by Jacob Hacker and Nate Loewentheil, which counters the nonsense of austerity economics and lays out a credible plan for public investments and economic security, a plan that could help revive jobs and growth and ensure "that gains are broadly shared."

Their agenda improves on most economic plans by adding demands for dramatic political reform.

"The best ideas are of little use without political movements, and those movements can only succeed in a political regime in which votes count more than money," Hacker said to me.

It's worth voting for progressives, but it's equally important to recognize that until there is real pressure from the left, the money and influence of the right will continue to pull any president in that direction.

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