“We still have work to do to make sure that this town is working on behalf of ordinary folks so that they can start once again believing in the American Dream,” Obama told donors in Washington last night. “Because people have lost confidence in the capacity of folks to look out for them as opposed to look out for themselves or their most powerful patrons.”

That is part of the Republican agenda, Obama argued: “To roll back environmental regulations; to try to shrink the capacity of government to act in a proactive way to make sure that we can out-educate and out-innovate and out-build the rest of the world; to basically allow the most powerful forces in our society to write their own rules and everybody else is going to be on their own.”