Great Expectations

If Barack Obama is as smart as they say he is, he’s fighting off an urge to go somewhere hard to find and hide. Deep inside, maybe, but somewhere that’s gut honest—that’s what he should be wanting to do in those moments when he can afford just to stop and think.
He has to be reading at least some of the same media articles I am: Time, Newsweek, Business Week, Network TV, newspapers, and so forth. I read them and I’m genuinely concerned—for him and for the nation. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
I remember observing the run-ups to the presidencies of Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, the first Bush, Clinton, the second Bush—and even the coming of Kennedy’s Camelot. I cannot remember a level of expectation like the present.
It’s as if they are expecting Obama to walk on water, turn the water into enormous amounts of cash, and raise all the debtor banks and corporations from the dead. The Media rave over his every appointment as if the appointees represent the second coming of the Twelve Apostles.
I can’t say Obama is feeding this frenzy. He seems to have a good enough grasp of reality to keep murmuring disclaimers and warning of difficulties ahead. Those who expect him to work miracles just don’t seem to be listening either to him or to the facts.
From the Mediterranean coast to the Indian subcontinent, we seem to be caught in deep quick sand with no obvious or easy way out. Whatever we do, however we extricate ourselves, something’s going to be worse than it was before.
Perhaps it’s like the people who fixed my wife’s laptop computer lately. They had to replace the speakers and that required a new mother board. Putting in the mother board broke the hard drive. (This all worked out well for my wife; she had a good warranty. But there never were guarantees for Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan/India—or Iran, or the fragile regime in Saudi Arabia.)
The best suggestion I’ve heard for that area (Newsweek) is that we pull out all bases—to cut down Muslim resentment at our physical presence—and maintain a balance of power by projecting our influence from outside the region. Great idea—very like Britain’s Nineteenth Century foreign policy, but we’ve already got our feet and hands stuck in the tar baby. It’s one mad tar baby to boot.
In some ways our military/foreign policy situation hasn’t looked this bleak since the combination we faced in early 1942: the fall of the Philippines, a row of sunken battleships, a massive German U-boat assault in the Atlantic, the fall of Tobruk in North Africa, the apparently unstoppable German attack into the Crimea in Russia. And we’re only looking at the top of the ice berg.
It could be pulled out, but it’s going to require all the ducks agreeing to sit in a row perfectly still. (Ask a duck hunter just how easy that is.) In other words, an enormous combination of luck and potentially unpopular moves that may be seen here as defeat. (Who lost China? Remember?)
Then there’s our economic situation. Oh boy. Bottom line is that everything Obama needs to do, everything he has promised to do, everything he is being advised to do is totally, finally, and utterly dependent on China continuing to buy US bonds (debt).
What if China stops? Not because it’s trying to hurt us, necessarily (after all, we’re their biggest market!), but because it is having enough economic and political problems at home—already there is serious unrest among the Chinese because of rising unemployment—so that spending any more cash on American treasuries (funding our national debt) just isn’t feasible? They already have a huge reserve of dollars.
Then where do we find the billions and trillions for bailouts and guarantees? The Japanese have finally stopped buying treasuries; only China is left as a high roller. If the Chinese cash stopped flowing, where would we find the money for better health care, repairs on infrastructure, and 21st Century education that Obama promised last fall?
China’s willingness to go on funding our debt is a slim thread to be hanging by. It’s a little like an NFL team whose only hope for the playoff is for a team that hasn’t been beaten all season to lose its next two games. Talk about needing a little help from your friends! Obama and company really, really do.
What if Obama doesn’t come through on the Messiah like expectations built up around him? Lyndon Johnson got a strong dose of the bile a constituency scorned can spew. I’ve an awful feeling that just as our expectations for Obama are higher and more unrealistic than they were for LBJ, so the bile will burn hotter when it comes.
He may live to wish someone found out he was actually born abroad and thus ineligible for the Presidency.