A Hundred Days Is Too Long

Surprise! President Obama’s approval rating has dropped 19 points in his first week. That has to be some kind of record. Were it to continue dropping at this rate, his rating would be way below zero in approximately five more weeks. It won’t, but the first drop should sober him.
On January 20 it seems there were a lot of people out there who expected Obama to walk across the Mall Reflecting Pond on his way to the White House. Seriously, it was almost as if they expected job offers in the mail by weekend, that on the 21st their banks would notify them that their mortgages were forgiven, their credit card debt vaporized, gasoline would be back to a dollar a gallon or less, and all those nasty little wars would have gone away.
Oh, and of course, Congress—Republicans and Democrats—would be locked in a permanent love fest with their new Leader.
Well, it’s already February and it hasn’t all happened. In fact, none of it has. People are still getting laid off, banks still tottering, Congress is still nattering away, and GIs still get blown up in foreign parts. People who really believed they were creating a whole new world with a whole new set of rules by simply pulling a lever on November 4 are becoming disillusioned.
After all, young and old, these are the generations that grew up wanting it all now. Mom and dad took twenty-five years to get all the things that made for a good life. Their kids wanted it all the day they were married—that’s the generation that’s fifty now. So they went out and charged it.
Master Card assures us on television that everything that isn’t “priceless” is available to us with a flick of the plastic. That’s “everything else”. So why should it startle us that this generation finally put itself under mortgages and loans they cannot hope to repay? It worked before; why isn’t it working now?
They expected Obama to put things back the way they used to be. Right now, with merely a flick of some governmental plastic. Overnight—just like you could buy what you wanted and have it delivered the next day. And Obama has begun to fail them.
His plastic isn’t working. It’s like the sinking feeling you get when your card comes up “ReJected”.
Oh he’s been able to make some symbolic moves. He’s overturned all those executive orders from the bad old Bush days that kept federal money out of the abortion business and other fun stuff. He’s announced that any bank that takes bailout money has to limit its senior executives to a half-million dollars a year salary.
This won’t hurt them. Just like Iacocca in the Chrysler bailout thirty years ago. He worked for a dollar a year—until he paid the government back. Then he took his millions in stocks and IOUs and went home.
Our bankers are gamblers today. In fact many of them are addicted to gambling. In effect we made them addicts when we changed laws and invented new commercial instruments that allowed them to gamble with their assets (thereby turning many of them completely toxic).
As any student of addiction will tell you, addition to gambling is actually an addiction to the adrenalin rush you get when you do high stakes gambling. The gambler becomes dependent on that rush—he must take bigger (and more foolish) risks to keep that rush coming.
The dependency becomes as great as that of a Heroin addict, and alcoholic, a sex addict or a workaholic. (These are all essentially the same kind of reaction.) Many of our bankers and handlers of commercial paper are as much junkies as any poor soul you see on the streets.
Obama keeps telling us the bailout is urgent (he’s not having all the luck he hoped he would in getting it). He doesn’t seem to realize that giving an addict another fix or another drink will not cure the dependency. Speed is necessary; he’s got to put these guys on a cold turkey regimen.
That will require new regulations and some new laws—guaranteeing that the addicted bankers are never permitted to gamble with other people’s money again. Cold turkey. No more bundles, no more risky mortgage or loan papers.
He’s got to face the fact that some of the people in his administration may be as addicted as anyone left on Wall Street. They won’t take happily to the notion that their favorite “casinos” are going to be placed off limits. He’s got a major, major problem on his hands—one he may never have dreamt of.
If he doesn’t deal with it BEFORE handing them bailout money, that problem is only going to get much, much worse. In the meantime, his approval rating is liable to drop much further.
Can you imagine how low Lincoln’s approval ratings (they didn’t take polls when he was in office, lucky fellow) would have registered after a dozen Confederate victories in a row? Obama may have to walk through the same shadowy valley of perceived failure. His job will be no easier than Lincoln’s.
That, more than merely coming from Illinois, will make him a worthy follower in the Great Emancipator’s steps.