Our nation is facing a crisis that threatens the wellbeing of our citizens and our standing as the most powerful actor on the world stage as much if not more than the crisis that was brought to our shores on September 11, 2001. This financial meltdown doesn't have the dramatic symbolism that the terrorists were able to inflict, not the kind of sudden run on the banks panic that marked the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. But this only makes the crisis more insidious, not less disastrous, because its pain seeps into our lives so much more slowly, and its causes are so much more hidden that the debate over how to deal with this situation causes the unsettling uncertainty to augment, adding to the creeping malaise that is permeating every pore of our nation.
But each month, record numbers of people enter the unemployment system, more homes go into foreclosure, and more and more individuals and businesses cannot pay their creditors. Our entire social structure threatens to cave in, as circulation of money seizes up, more businesses go bankrupt, more people loose their incomes and their pensions, bills go unpaid, service companies cut back, hospitals become inoperable, food banks become overwhelmed, etc etc. No one is safe from its effects, as property values decline in neighborhoods, financial institutions that are invested directly and indirectly in these properties become insolvent, the stock market fluctuates wildly, hoping and praying for its bottom, and monetary values become virtually meaningless.
In the face of such foreseeable dangers, it would seem that our leaders would come together, listen to a variety of experts who have no special interests to advance or protect, and come up with a philosophy that would be agreeable to everyone involved in working to do everything possible to help mitigate this crisis. But, alas, that hasn't happened, yet. It appears that the idealogical divide between the right and the left is simply too vast, and despite the new president's sincere attempts to change the political tone set by the previous administration and the Republican leaders in Congress (who among us can forget Tom Delay's smiling mug shot), his reaching out to conservatives, meeting with them, discussing the issues with them, and including them, even offering up their precious tax cuts from the get go, without haggling or playing the usual political games with our nation's future, all in the name of bipartisanship.
And what does he get in return? He gets accused of far-left idealogical partisanship. As he alluded to in his first press conference, President Obama is being accused of increasing the size of government simply because Democrats supposedly just love Big Government, a viewpoint that completely ignores the advice of all serious economists for government action in times of a recession. To be sure, if some real social benefit to further depriving the government of revenues by cutting taxes during a recession could actually be proved to be an effective way to deal with the problem at hand, which already entails less tax dollars because of less sales taxes, lower property values, and less income taxes, then let us truly consider that option. However, the idea that cutting taxes at this time will help to stimulate the economy is nothing more than a fantasy of Reaganomics. When the problem consists of a lack of circulation, one does not go and cut the blood flow to the head. We must inject capital into the system and work to keep it fluid through government spending, the only entity capable of doing so on a large scale, at whatever the cost, just as a heart attack patient does not squabble with the cost of his emergency treatment. The conservative narrative that less government is always good simply doesn't hold up under such an emergency situation as this, especially after they allowed so much of our nation's wealth to be squandered on the war in Iraq and the Big Government Patriot Act, which were supposed to have made our nation stronger and safer, but have failed miserably.
Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America precisely because the people of this nation are tired of politics as usual, of incompetent partisan hacks being put into important positions of power by the Bush administration, of the Congress not getting anything done due to partisan haggling, of the utter lack of oversight that has tainted our food supply, brought lead-filled toys from China into the hands of our children, allowed convicted felons to become mortgage brokers, cheered the financial institutions on as they created profit schemes that were so complicated that they lost all connection with reality, and always favored Wall Street over Main Street, lobbyists over constituents. And the fallout of deregulation continues to rain down on us as we find out that the SEC looked the other way as common thugs stole millions of dollars the good old fashioned way - through the "trust me" scheme - and who knows what the future holds. Rachel Maddow has it right with the title of her segment about cleaning up the mess left by the Bush administration, "Scrub, Rinse, Repeat - because this is going to take a while." Could there be any stronger indictment of small-government, deregulation policies than what we see in the news every day? Could ideologues of the party that lost power because of its incompetence and political divisiveness be any less clueless that the whole point of the electorate choosing Barack Obama was because, no really, we actually do want change, as in a government that actually works for us?
President Obama has many challenges before him, indeed. But perhaps the most daunting of them all is his promise of "change." He is up against powers that will resist him, no matter what he does, no matter how carefully and sensitively he goes about instituting that change, and no matter what concessions he makes in the name of bipartisanship. Some may see the passage of the stimulus bill, his first attempt at this change, as a failure on his part, because of the resistance of the Republicans. Some might see his concessions to their demands as politics as usual. But I believe in his mission of gentle and subtle change, of reaching out, even if his hand was not received as he was hoping. I see a bigger picture than what he has to do at the beginning of his term, because he is attempting to gain the trust of a large segment of the population that does not trust him for merely ideological or racist reasons. His actions have to stand above the conservative noise machine of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, who mistake his intentions through their lack of imagination.
Conservatives and traditionalists inherently tend to see others through their own framework of understanding, and therefore to project their own thinking patterns onto everyone else. In their minds, the "opposition party" only wants to exact revenge for how badly they were treated - excluded, bullied, belittled, accused of all kinds of ways of trying to destroy the nation with their liberal-ness - during the eight long years of the Bush administration, because that is what they would do if they had been treated that way. What they fail to understand is that Barack Obama represents a segment of our society that have been cast as less capable, less deserving of power, or freedom, less patriotic, and a people to be feared because they might well be angry that they were once held as slave property, and as such, African Americans have been completely misunderstood as wanting to exact revenge or rejection or total domination, when the reality is that all they want, and all Progressives want, and all women want, despite Hollywood depictions and the conservatives' own secret masochistic fantasies, is to be treated fairly and equally, to have our place at the table, to be included in the power structures, so that our society will be more fair and just.
President Obama has just today proven my point about moving decisively and carefully to initiate his changes while assuring the nation that the changes are not just a swing toward the opposite political ideology. He has announced that he will be spending the week showing his intentions toward fiscal responsibility, a key element in balancing the big spending that he has rolled out as emergency measures in the face of the current financial crisis. This sends the message that this is not all about creating Big Government for the sake of Big Government, which is what liberals supposedly believe in. For some reason, we are not supposed to believe in personal responsibility, just government handouts, despite Clinton's creation of a surplus and his dismantling of the welfare system. He says he is going to go through the books, line by line, and look at what we are spending money on, see if it is useful spending, and cut out whatever is not. He specifically mentioned no-bid contracts and wasteful war spending that goes unaccounted for. In the end, he is going to prove that he was not just making pretty speeches to get elected, but rather, that he actually intends to try to carry through his campaign promises - what a concept! And this action will allow him to find ways to fund his more controversial projects, like health care reform, because his ideology is not just about ideas, but action, responsibility, and building a government that really does function the way that one can under real, highly-engaged leadership. Barack Hussein Obama is going to put all other recent presidents to shame with his abilities to multi-task and to lead the charge with vigor and strength of character. He will get things done.
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